Cocoa, economic development and social and environmental sustainability? If we didn't know better, we would have thought Cadbury's had gone Fairtrade on its 100-year anniversary of buying cocoa from Ghana. While this unfortunately isn't the case, Cadbury's announcement this morning of the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership does sound like a step in the right direction for mainstream chocolate bars, big business and especially cocoa farmers.

Cadbury and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) joined forces to create the partnership off the back of Cadbury-funded research done by the Institute of Development Studies in the UK and the University of Ghana. The study looked into sustainable cocoa production in Ghana and found that cocoa farmers get less than half of the potential cocoa yield and what's worse, fewer and fewer young Ghanaians want to continue the cocoa growing tradition.

Whether it's a need for cocoa, a streak of human empathy or a bit of both, the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership programme sounds like a good idea to us. It aims to help farmers improve their cocoa yield in a sustainable way, make cocoa farming attractive to the younger generation and invest in the cocoa growing communities in terms of education and sanitation.

Cadbury's Tony Bilsborough told SmartPlanet: "We do share the same goals as the Fairtrade movement, which is to improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers and their communities, but it works two ways -- we need to ensure the future of our cocoa supply chain and to make sure cocoa farming itself is viable as we want to encourage people to remain in cocoa farming and not go to the cities and look for other work."

Chocolatiers Green & Blacks, who are owned by Cadbury, see the new partnership as a positive. "All our Green & Black's experience is that working with the cocoa farmers directly is the perfect sweet spot between doing good business and doing good," Dominic Lowe, Managing Director of Green & Blacks, told SmartPlanet.

"Whilst we have excellent experience working with our partner co-operative in Belize, we have never tried anything on the scale of the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership. I hope we will learn a lot from them as they roll out the Ghana scheme."

The new Cadbury partnership is a good step to be sure, but perhaps they could take advice from Fairtrade chocolate company Divine, which seems to have no problem keeping the cocoa supply chain going. Kuapa Kokoo, a Ghanaian cocoa cooperative that supplies Divine with cocoa -- and owns nearly half of the company -- is growing quickly. As some of the farmers told us when we visited last summer: "Everybody wants to be a member of Kuapa Kokoo."

Maybe a Fairtrade premium and a stake in Cadbury's would keep the youngsters in the cocoa fields happy?

Source: Smart Planet