Please see below a press release on the Vision for Change and our partnership with ICRAF and national partners, which was released earlier this week:
Abidjan – 20 November 2012 For over a hundred years, cocoa has been the black gold of Western Africa, despite a political trading past that has often darkened the pages of history. Now, a partnership between two unlikely organizations
We have a special guest blog post by Ermias Betemariam, Land Health Scientist from the World Agroforesty Centre (ICRAF), who recently returned from Cote d’Ivoire.
I recently returned from a work trip to Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer. Part of my time there was spent visiting with smallholder cocoa farmers involved in the Vision for Change: Sustainable Cocoa Communities project.
The project—a
Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus (CSSV) has wreaked havoc on cocoa crops throughout much of West Africa and continues to inflict serious economic and human hardship in cocoa-growing countries. As part of our research and collaborative efforts to better manage and combat this disease, Mars Chocolate and ICRAF recently held a regional workshop on CSSV in Accra, Ghana.
The weeklong workshop brought together more than
Every now and then in cocoa sustainability work it’s very useful to take stock of where we are on a particular topic, share ideas and put experts together. At the end of last year we did this for the areas of cocoa soils and use of fertilizer in cocoa production. We started work on our Vision For Change program in Ivory Coast and have
