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rfmcdonaldNPR's Eliza Barclay makes a report that make sense of a lot of press coverage about West African cocoa. Of course there would be heavy recourse to child and slave labour if the cocoa plantations are unrenumative.
[T]he 2015 Cocoa Barometer [is] an overview of sustainability issues in the cocoa sector, written by various European and U.S. NGOs, and was released in the U.S. this week. And what they're really worried about is the people who grow the beans that are ground up to make our beloved treat.
"The world is running out of cocoa farmers," the report states. "Younger generations no longer want to be in cocoa. Older generations are reaching their life expectancy."
It's well known that most cocoa farmers live in extreme poverty. There are about 2 million small-scale farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast, the West African countries that produce at least 70 percent of the world's cocoa beans. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana earns 84 cents a day, while the average small farmer in Ivory Coast earns just 50 cents a day, according to the Barometer.
I met two women cocoa farmers at the World Cocoa Foundation's meeting in Washington, D.C., this week. Assata Doumbia tells me (in French, through a translator) that she and her husband are both in ECAM, a cooperative of 900 farmers in Ivory Coast, and that their income is "extremely low, almost nothing." What little they do earn goes straight to her husband.
"Men have all the control and decision-making power in the cocoa sector," she says, though she and a few other women are trying to change that for the 120 women in the cooperative.blockquote>
