The cocoa industry has taken bold steps to preventing deforestation in the Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI), a public private collaboration between 33 cocoa and chocolate companies (85% of the industry), the governments of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and led by the World Cocoa Foundation and the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH). This effort is based…
The Living Income Community of Practice, of which the Food Lab is a founding partner, released a report on the Ghana Living Income Benchmark & Analysis of Income Gaps for Cocoa Growing Regions. The study outlines a roadmap to achieve living incomes for cocoa farmers through a credible, third party analysis. Follow these links to the…
In July, Stephanie Daniels, Senior Program Director of Agriculture and Development, facilitated a workshop with the leaders of Ghana’s cocoa sector and global chocolate industry on research to determine a Living Income Benchmark in cocoa growing regions of Ghana. The workshop was done in collaboration with the World Cocoa Foundation, GIZ and the Living Income Community…
Building high performing and resilient sectors requires looking beyond the value chain and improving the governance of a sector. The last two decades have seen an increasing emphasis on company and supply chain driven approaches to promote sustainable production and trade of agricultural commodities such as cocoa, coffee, cotton and staple crops. Some of these…
Many sectors have developed platform or “backbone” organizations with a mandate to collect and manage precompetitive data. While there is a large amount of detailed data out there currently (farm size, income, adoption of practices, productivity), there has been a lot of hesitation in sharing this data for fear that it may be misunderstood or…
The year’s workshop was focused on how companies are using data to inform strategy on the ground. Two such examples were presented by ABInBev and Mars, Inc. of how they linked results from their studies to business operations. ABInBev presented on their impact study on smallholder sorghum and barley in Uganda. The study uncovered supply…
A cross-section of more than 50 people representing the Ghana cocoa sector came together March 9 in Accra to review the advances of the Climate Smart Value Chain project being implemented by CIAT, IITA, Rainforest Alliance, Root Capital and the Sustainable Food Lab. This workshop builds on a kick-off workshop held in May 2015, field visits and joint work combining soil mapping with climate…
As multinational companies grow more sophisticated in understanding their supply chains, the research community is also getting better at modeling and predicting future weather patterns, diseases, water availability and other climate change impacts. The question is, how well are these sectors supporting and feeding each other? Is the science on shifting crop suitability reaching the…