The Truth Behind the International Chocolate Industry
The production and sale of food and drinks generates billions of Euros worldwide. Corporations that produce on a large scale, and lately retailers, control the market and receive the biggest share of the revenues. However, when it comes down to taking responsibility for the working and environmental conditions along the supply chain, these corporations stress that they are under no legal obligation to act. Retailers also often claim that they are merely fulfilling their customers’ demands, denying their own influence on shaping the very same demands through massive marketing, using their market power to maximize profits in the first place .
Market mechanisms currently described as unfair trade practices cause human and workers’ rights violations, as well as long-lasting environmental damage. Large and economically powerful multinational companies assert considerable influence on national legal frameworks, meaning that their own focus on profit maximization leads to laws protecting short term corporate profit while denying or externalizing environmental and health costs to society.
The SupplyCha!nge project brings together a group of civil society organizations from across Europe and the Global South. Friends of the Earth Malta is the Maltese partner in this project whose main objective is to make supermarket store brands (sometimes known as ‘own brands’ or ‘private labels’) fairer and more sustainable. We know that thus far supermarkets are not doing enough to counter these problems. Compared to their enormous influence, efforts of supermarket chains to prevent human rights violations and to reduce environmental damage along their product supply chains are often disappointing.
Despite cocoa beans being a global commodity feeding the chocolate desires of industrialised nations, the production is still largely in the hands of millions of small holders. Cocoa provides the livelihood of over 5 million farmers worldwide. Further up the supply chain concentration processes have led to a mere handful of companies dominating the market. This report takes a look behind the curtain of the international chocolate industry, uncovering the massive imbalances in the sector as well as the social and environmental challenges that cocoa producers are facing. Our geographical focus lies on West Africa – specifically Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon – as most of the cocoa processed in Europe originates there.
The report covers the most important stages in the chocolate supply chain, focusing both on one of its most powerful actors – the supermarkets – as well as on the most vulnerable group of participants: cocoa farmers, (migrant) farm-workers, children and especially women. It presents an analysis of pesticide residues found on 41 Austrian chocolate bars and Easter Bunnies and an overview of the sustainability programmes of Austrian retailers towards cocoa. Besides the social problems, as poverty, child labour and exploitation of farm-workers, it highlights the environmental problems of cocoa production, deforestation and pesticide use, their causes and consequences, and points to possible solutions. It also highlights two special issues concerning cocoa production in Ghana and Cameroon: the interaction between gold mining activities and cocoa in Ghana and the consequences of the World Bank”s Structural Adjustment Programs on the cocoa sector in Cameroon.
Furthermore, different solutions, from certified cocoa (including a label-check) to initiatives of the industries, are presented. The report closes with demands on different actors and policy-makers, recommendations for chocolate consumers, and includes a label-check.
The value chain of chocolate is very complex, opaque and characterized by a massive imbalance in the market at the expense of small-scale farmers. The impoverishment of cocoa farmers, exploitation of workers, child labour and environmental impacts are the main characteristics of today’s chocolate industry