Featured Member Mondelez

As the world’s largest snacks company, we are passionate about chocolate. Cocoa is the essence of our chocolate and vital to our business, so we ensure it is ‘made right’. Making it right means tackling the complex challenges that cocoa farmers face from creating sustainable cocoa farming business and building empowered cocoa communities, to ensuring forests are conserved and restored. Through Cocoa Life, our global cocoa sustainability program, we are leading the transformation of the sector by creating a movement for lasting change. Founded in 2012, we are on the ground in six cocoa-growing countries: Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, India, and Brazil.

We believe partnerships are key to lasting change. Cocoa Life is built on partnerships with governments, non-governmental organizations, supply chain partners, cocoa farming organizations, and farming communities. The challenges cocoa faces are all connected, so we take a holistic approach to tackling them. Our commitment is that by 2025, all our chocolate brands will source their cocoa from Cocoa Life. Choosing the Cocoa Life logo means that everyone can love our chocolate as much as we do because it’s made the right way.

We work on the ground, hand-in-hand with the men and women who grow our cocoa to make cocoa farming a sustainable business. We help farmers become more productive, so they can increase their income from cocoa, andmake sure they have access to training and coaching to help improve cocoa yields and protect the environment. By the end of 2018, we had trained 142,875 farmers on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and distributed 8,428,682 seedlings.

A sustainable cocoa supply begins with empowered cocoa farmers. We are empowering the men, women and youth within cocoa communities to lead their own development and improve their livelihoods through entrepreneurship. Since 2012, we have empowered more than 1,400 communities to drive their own development. We provide cocoa farming communities with access to Village Saving and Loan Association (VSLA) schemes. 70,921 community members have participated in VSLAs by the end of 2018. We also strive for gender equality and are working with partners to tackle the root causes of child labor with a holistic, community-centric approach. By the end of 2018, 74,318 community members had been trained on gender awareness and 116,004 on issues of child labor.

Cocoa Life is committed to eliminating deforestation, maintaining cocoa ecosystems and protecting the land and the forests – it’s our promise to future generations. Cocoa farmers are already seeing the impacts of climate change and if we don’t take action, current cocoaproducing regions may no longer be suitable for cocoa production in the next 30 years. Through Cocoa Life we invest in farmer training and adoption of good practices which can include agroforestry, mobilize communities to protect forests, plant trees and more. We provide training on Good Environmental Practices (GEP) to farmers and farm workers, distribute high-quality cocoa seedlings and shade trees, create demo plots and cocoa nurseries, and improve farmer access to affordable fertilizer. By the end of 2018, 114,380 farmers had been trained on GEP, and we had distributed 1,232,059 shade trees.

Indonesia is one of the largest cocoa producing countries in the world. Since 2014, when Cocoa Life Indonesia was founded, we have trained 37,654 farmers on GAP, distributed 1,483,439 seedlings, and trained 1,776 youths (15-25 years) on cocoa-related enterprises. As part of our work to empower cocoa communities, we have created 695 VSLA groups, two of which are linked to financial institutions. By 2018, 15,095 community members had participated in VSLAs.

Through the Cocoa Life program we have trained 5,793 community members on gender awareness and 4,388 on issues of child labor. We collaborate with Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Olam, Save the Children, Swisscontact, Wahana Visi Indonesia, and the Department of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection to implement Cocoa Life interventions. Cocoa Life had distributed 54,267 shade trees by 2018 to provide additional sources of income and shade to help cocoa grow. We have also trained more than 37,000 farmers on GEP to ensure that they not only increase productivity, but protect forests, and develop more resilience to climate change.

To find out more about our work in Indonesia and around the world visit: www.cocoalife.org.