By Ange Aboa, Joe Bavier
This month, Ivory Coast and Ghana – the world’s top two cocoa producers – teamed up to impose a minimum floor price that chocolate companies must pay if they want to access their more than 60% share of global supply.
It’s an attempt to ease pervasive farmer poverty that has become a blight on chocolate’s image and a threat to the sector’s future in West Africa, as young people walk away from a life of backbreaking labour with little reward.
The Cocoa Barometer, a biannual report published by civil society groups, calculates that farmers receive just 6.6% of the sale price for a bar of chocolate. And last year a Fairtrade International survey found that just 12% of Ivorian cocoa-farming households earned $2.50 per person per day, a level it calculated to be the living income benchmark…Read more>>
