Cocoanect committed to the Cocoa and Forests Initiative

The Cocoa and Forests Initiative represents commitments on forest protection and restoration in cocoa growing regions. The governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana, together with leading chocolate and cocoa companies including Cocoanect, have announced Frameworks for Action.  We are pleased to see that accelerating sustainable cocoa production and addressing global and local climate change is high on the cocoa agenda in 2018. 

World Cocoa Foundation, IDH – the Sustainable Trade Initiative and The Prince’s International Sustainability Unit (ISU) announced the initiative in March last year. The Prince of Wales underlined the importance of this initiative:

“I have for many years been deeply committed to the protection of the world’s tropical rainforests. They play an absolutely crucial role, both globally and locally, in climate change mitigation and adaptation, in ensuring sustainable livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people and in conserving biodiversity.”     The Prince of Wales. 

At the 23rd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 23) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Germany, last November, the framework and associated commitments were presented. Individual company action plans and initiatives, including our Procarbooh initiative and Forest Conservation Initiative, will be aligned with this framework.

The Hana river meandering through the Tai National Park, Ivory Coast.

Building the resilience of the cocoa farmer communities is at the heart of Cocoanect’s sustainability initiatives. The Procarbooh Initiative, which pilots clean cookstoves in cocoa communities, aims to reduce deforestation, as well as household air pollution and child labour. The Forest Conservation Initiative, which is West-Africa’s only cocoa program that monitors biodiversity across different cocoa production systems, is protecting the buffer zones around national parks. After a successful start in the buffer zones around the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast, this initiative is being expanded to Kakum National Park in Ghana this year.

While the Cocoa and Forests Initiative has a focus on Ghana and Ivory Coast in the first instance, the actions have a clear relevance for cocoa farming in other parts of the world. Since 2017, Cocoanect actively supports the Tambopata-Bahuaja project in the Peruvian Amazon as part of our involvement in the REDD+ Business Initiative, in cooperation with Ecosphere+, Canadian NGO Ecotierra, and Peruvian NGO AIDER. Together we advance sustainable economic development and environmental protection by restoring over 586,000 hectares of threatened forest. In the buffer zones around the park, organic fine flavour cocoa has been introduced, creating up to 400 smallholder cocoa production jobs. The Fine Flavour cocoa of this project will be available in mid-2018.

With the new agreements to accelerate investment in the long-term sustainable production of cocoa, Cocoanect is looking forward to further increase our efforts in fighting deforestation in the cocoa supply chain.

National Reserve Tambopata, Peru. Photo © Marlon Dag

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Read more about our sustainability initiatives on cocoanect.com/sustainability