While the procedure rebounds in the United States against the multinational chocolate companies, accused of having encouraged child labor, the director general of the International Poop Organization ...

To be sustainable, cocoa should be paid for three times as much, according to ICCO

Audio 01:59

January 2021, Soubré, Ivory Coast, collection of cocoa.

REUTERS - LUC GNAGO

By: Claire Fages Follow

5 mins

As lawsuits rebound in the United States against multinational chocolate companies accused of encouraging child labor, the director general of the International Cocoa Organization says the world price of cocoa is too low for cocoa to be environmentally and socially sustainable.

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Child labor, deforestation ... "

There will be no answer to the sustainability problems of cocoa in West Africa without an increase in world prices

", judges Michel Arrion, the director general of the International Organization of cocoa (ICCO).

2000 dollars per tonne is a third of the cocoa prices of forty years ago, he emphasizes.

The root cause of the cocoa problems is first of all poverty, rural poverty, and in cocoa growing areas, this poverty is due to the fact that cocoa is bought or sold at far too low amounts

Ivory Coast and Ghana have shown the way

We must "

integrate into the cost of cocoa the real cost, that of the externalities of deforestation, economic infrastructure ... If we integrate all these costs we arrive at a price of the order of what it was forty years ago.

», Summarizes the man who has headed the ICCO for two and a half years.

Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana have “shown the way” by demanding a decent income differential from bean buyers.

But "

even with 65% of world production they have remained dependent on the markets of London and New York

", where prices have sagged since the outbreak of the Covid, global demand for chocolate having suffered a blow with the closure of restaurants due to the pandemic, while cocoa production continued to increase.

Go beyond a cocoa OPEC?

We have not yet managed to set up a system where all the producers speak with one voice,

" recognizes Michel Arrion.

However, there could be consultations where everyone agrees not to exceed certain production quotas.

But beyond an "OPEC of cocoa", which would bring together only the producing countries, the boss of the International Cocoa Organization calls for a dialogue between producing and consuming countries, on the model of that which launched the European Union with Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to prepare the ground for its businesses, which will soon see much tougher regulations imposed on imported deforestation and human and social rights abuses, including the work of children in cocoa plantations.

Exemplary dialogue between Europe, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana

Proposals in this direction will be debated in April, during the council of the International Cocoa Organization, which brings together 22 cocoa producing countries and 29 cocoa consuming countries, with the notable exception of the United States, which is the seat of large multinationals in the world. chocolate.

Raw materials chronicle - To be sustainable, cocoa should be paid for three times as much, according to ICCO

To be sustainable, cocoa should be paid for three times as much, according to ICCO

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