The free market holds no great respect for smallholder farmers. In a world driven by supply and demand, people are expendable. If there is oversupply, "let them do something else" to paraphrase Marie Antoinette.
This is not a sustainable proposition. We cannot afford to throw farmers off their land, drive them to the cities, to grow opium, or simply perish. We are dependent on smallholder farmers around the world for 70% of our food. They are the best stewards of the land, which risks being stripped bare by agri-business and monoculture.
It's not enough for a business to ensure the continuity of its supply by investing in farming yield and mechanisation. This ability to improve, adapt, and invest should be in the hands of the farmers themselves – in otherwords, their earnings should remunerate them well enough to allow them to manage their own development, conservation, and training.
There are millions of pounds being spent on investment in ensuring a continuous supply of cocoa as demand for chocolate grows – but in general this is millions being spent by large multinational chocolate companies rather than by the farmers themselves.
Recent consumer research by Mintel revealed a 120% growth, in the last year, in the number of new chocolate products carrying ethical labels such as Fairtrade. There really is a revolution happening in our favourite cocoa-based consumer goods category – some of the biggest corporations in the world have converted their biggest brands in the world to Fairtrade.
And that's really good for farmers, and while it creates competition for Divine and a challenging environment, we set out from the beginning to be a catalyst for change in the chocolate industry and are still setting the bar. Fairtrade chocolate sales in the UK topped £820m in 2013, a 52% increase on 2012, according to the Fairtrade Foundation. That's almost 10-fold the amount bought in 2003. Today, more than a fifth of UK chocolate carries the Fairtrade Mark.
Consumers clearly have an appetite, not only for delicious chocolate, but for social enterprise which benefits and empowers the farming communities. At Divine we've prided ourselves on developing a traceable supply chain so that we know that the chocolate we're selling comes directly from the beans of the cocoa farmers that actually own the company. We're here to improve the livelihoods of the farmers in Ghana giving them a bigger share of the wealth we're creating.
Divine Chocolate has been a true bastion of the Fairtrade chocolate movement throughout. The social enterprise is 45% owned by the Ghanaian farmers who grow its cocoa beans, and they get 45% of profits, as well as benefiting from the sale of their beans, which empowers them economically. We were recently joined here in the UK by two of the farmers from Kuapa Kokoo, the co-operative in Ghana that co-owns Divine. It's arriving here in London, seeing their chocolate on display for the first time, and the realisation of how much money chocolate makes that really brings home to the farmers what they are part of – the importance of their role in the chocolate supply chain. We are delighted that this week there are Kuapa farmers touring Australia, Scotland, and attending Divine Board meetings in the US and UK – a real testament to what World Fair Trade Day and Divine are all about – giving a voice to the farmers, all around the globe.
As more equitable partners in the chocolate making process, the Kuapa farmers are given the opportunity to grow their own business and ensure its future, at the same time as making cocoa farming more attractive to the next generation. Divine has now turned over £100m since it was set up back in 1998, and in addition to the Fairtrade premium we pay, and the profits we have distributed, 2% of our turnover (£2m) has been used to run Kuapa projects which make the cooperative a really innovative, well-skilled and well-run organisation.
Imagine what 2% of turnover of a multinational chocolate company could do in the hands of farmers who could then decide together how to develop their ability to supply excellent product well into the future.
Copy on this page is provided by Fairtrade Foundation supporter of the supply chain hub
