How to save a Rainforest (by changing chocolate)

Published:January 31, 2023 | Community 社群, TRIBE

With a growing awareness of the impact of our food system on the planet, we’ve increasingly seen more awareness of how it is destroying our greatest natural carbon absorbers: the rainforests. Conversations about the clearing of Southeast Asian forests for palm oil have existed for years, and more recently with the horrifying (and intensifying) Amazon fires, people have started to become more aware of the heavy toll beef farming has on rainforests.

However, there is one foodstuff that has largely escaped such scrutiny. One that has all but wiped out rainforests in the countries of its production and driven entire wildlife populations to the brink of extinction. One that is eaten and enjoyed by unsuspecting consumers all over the world.

Chocolate.

Darkest (African) Chocolate

Despite what you may read about ‘Swiss’ or ‘Belgian’ chocolate on the packaging, 60-70% of chocolate’s core ingredient, the cocoa bean, is actually grown in the West African countries of Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Ghana, which were once two of the most biodiverse in Africa. In the 1950s and 60s, Cote d’Ivoire alone had between 9-12 million hectares of rainforest teeming with wildlife, from chimpanzees to pygmy hippos to the forest elephants that gave the country its name.

Today, almost all of this is gone.

While it is possible to grow cocoa within rainforests via agroforestry, the farming method favoured in West Africa is open-sun monocultures. And because cocoa trees are most productive when planted on recently deforested soil, this means that more and more forest has to be felled to keep up with an ever growing global demand for chocolate. As a result, between 1961 and 2000, land used for open-sun cocoa farming in West Africa expanded from 3 to 5 million hectares.

Much of this is rooted in the staggering income inequality within mainstream chocolate. While the global industry was estimated to be worth US$ 113.6 billion in 2021, cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana receive only a measly 6% of the proceeds of the average chocolate bar (down from 16% in 1980). This occurs in part due to lengthy supply chains of middlemen that dilute the amount of money available for farmers, driving many to illegally raze forests to grow more cocoa.

Confectionary Carnage

The environmental devastation of the mainstream chocolate industry is hard to overstate. Since the 1960s, around 90% of the rainforests in Cote d’Ivoire –which now has over 2.4 million hectares of cocoa plantations– have been destroyed. Meanwhile, Ghana has lost 65% of its rainforest. Worse still, around 40% in Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa is grown illegally within protected areas, in part due to the reduced productivity of aging cocoa trees on legal plantations.

Naturally, wildlife too has suffered greatly. Prior to the 1890s, Cote d’Ivoire is thought to have had one of the largest forest elephant populations in Africa, and in the 1960s still had a population of 100,000. But as of 2020, there are now estimated to be only 225 left, thanks largely to deforestation for cocoa. This in turn makes them more vulnerable to poachers as their habitats become smaller, more isolated and easier to find. Meanwhile, many protected areas with cocoa plantations have lost all of their primate species, with some believed to now be extinct in the wild.

All of this is terrible for the climate too. A 2018 study found that chocolate produced through deforestation has a higher carbon footprint than some forms of beef farming. Additionally, forest elephants play a vital role in helping trees to grow larger and absorb more carbon by eating and trampling the smaller plants that they would compete for resources with. So by driving their numbers down, the chocolate industry is also reducing the effectiveness of Africa’s remaining rainforests as a carbon sink.

Worst of all, this is happening with the full knowledge and complicity of large chocolate brands. When a report by the environmental NGO, Mighty Earth, implicated 70 chocolate companies in the sourcing of cocoa beans from within protected areas, none of those companies denied those accusations. And despite chocolate companies signing a pledge in 2017 to end deforestation in their supply chains, a later investigation by Mighty Earth found that between 2019 and 2022, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana had lost nearly 60,000 hectares of rainforest to cocoa plantations.

A Sweet New Deal

Under current rates of deforestation, both Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana will likely lose all of their remaining rainforests within as little as the next decade. To stand any chance of preventing this, urgent changes are needed both in the mainstream chocolate industry and in how we as consumers buy chocolate.

Among the many actions that the mainstream chocolate industry can take is to tackle its income inequality, restructuring supply chains to reduce intermediaries and ideally buy directly from cocoa farmers. The possibility of processing of cocoa beans within the countries of production should also be explored, as this would provide much-needed employment to local people and make direct buying from farmers easier, whilst also saving on manufacturing expenses in a lower cost country. All of this could reduce the need for farmers to clear ever more rainforest for cocoa just to survive.

As for more directly combatting deforestation, chocolate brands can adopt the model used by the Brazilian Amazon Soy Moratorium, which saw great success in eliminating deforestation from soy supply chains. Under such a model, chocolate brands could pool resources with governments and each other to monitor deforestation, enforce compliance with anti-deforestation policies and immediately cease buying from suppliers that supply cocoa beans grown in protected areas, instead switching to agroforestry-grown cocoa.

For consumers’ part, a general rule of thumb is to check the packaging of chocolate to see if it lists the origin of its cocoa. If it doesn’t, then it likely came from Cote d’Ivoire or Ghana. Another option is to visit a chocolate brand’s website to see if they 1) include an impact report for their environmental practices, 2) have tangible sustainability goals and 3) if the report was written with the input of environmentalists and other third-party analysts who are more likely to give an objective assessment.

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