Improving cocoa yields can help communities in other ways. For example, the crop depletes the soil of nutrients, so it grows best on plots with other plants. This means that companies with a vested interest in healthy cocoa need to work with governments and NGOs to encourage sustainable farming in general, not just for cocoa.
Companies also benefit from supporting education in local communities. The average age of cocoa farmers is about fifty, says Bill Guyton, president of the World Cocoa Foundation. In an ideal situation, education programs can ensure that there is a generation of cocoa farmers for these corporate players to work with 20 years from now.
Education goes both ways. "Candidly, we don't have as big of a physical presence in West Africa as we should," says Hershey's McCormick. But part of COCOALINK involves setting up research centers in West Africa. "We're doing a heck of a lot of cocoa research for future product formulations," he says. "We're going to use our farm to get our scientists closer to the farmers and the farm."
Philanthropy vs. taking care of business: room for both?
There's clearly a business case for companies, but how far will these efforts go towards helping farmers? The chocolate industry has an ugly history in West Africa. Around 2000, when the WCF formed, Congress received reports of serious violations of child labor laws on West African cocoa farms. In some cases, third parties were trucking children in to cocoa-producing regions and reports said that many kids were exploited and forced to work without pay. In other cases, cocoa-farming families encouraged children to work with them in the fields, often putting them in dangerous situations: wielding machetes, exposure to pesticides.
It can be difficult for companies alone to enforce child labor laws, but they will have to push to do so. "Companies do need to play a role in the child labor issue and they are," Guyton says. "It's a shared responsibility with the African governments and also the communities where it happens."
But sharing responsibility can make it difficult to enforce standards, especially when governments don't have child labor laws that meet U.S. standards. Big corporate investment could deliver benefits because of increased transparency demands from consumers and NGOs. From a business standpoint, these companies can't afford lawsuits and bad public exposure.
Fortune 500 cocoa-hungry companies stand to be a force for good, says Osita Ogbu, an economics professor at the University of Nigeria and a fellow with the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative. "Anything that improves the productivity of cocoa farmers that increases the rural income, and at the same time addresses environmental scarcity, is welcome," he says.
And successful philanthropy often requires for-profit organizations, NGOs, local people and governments to work together, a path that the chocolate industry is pursuing.
But the real step towards sustainability will come when companies expand their thinking beyond helping farmers and start to manufacture chocolate locally. That's where you'll start to see significant profit margins for West Africans and job creation, says Ogbu. "Is it possible that the sons of daughters of cocoa farmers will not be cocoa farmers but will work in chocolate factories?" That, he says, will mark the beginning of a truly sustainable Kiss.
