Thirty-three leading cocoa and chocolate-producing companies (World Cocoa Foundation members), have come together with the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to sign the Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI) Frameworks for Action to end deforestation and restore forest areas. Full marks to everyone for pulling together to achieve this. Special mention goes to The Prince of Wales for the initiation and NGO Mighty Earth for making sure it happened.
When taking action, nothing is easy. In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, people have lived and worked in the forests for decades, and cannot just be moved on. We need to protect the forests while supporting sustainable livelihoods, by growing ‘more cocoa on less land’.
What is Nestlé Doing?
What will we do as Nestlé within the CFI framework? Our actions focus on our Nestlé Cocoa Plan supply chain, through which we have forged relationships with smallholders to ensure responsibly sourced cocoa by working under three pillars – Better farming, Better lives, Better cocoa.
Firstly, we are mapping field outlines for all the farmers – about 85,000 across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. We estimate that means walking 102,000km – that’s a lot of legwork!
Secondly, we are distributing over 2.6 million forest tree seedlings to farmers over the next four years, as we encourage them to grow forest trees alongside cocoa.
Thirdly, we will work with an NGO to try some agroforestry experiments – growing cocoa with a much higher density of forest trees, in areas where the government wants to reforest degraded areas.