The Mars/ICRAF Vision For Change project aims to achieve several important goals when it comes to sustainable cocoa. We are working to not only revitalize cocoa farms around Soubré and across Côte d’Ivoire to enable higher yields, but we’re also working to improve the quality of cocoa being produced.
It’s not enough to simply produce more cocoa – it has to be of a
What does our Vision for Change program in Côte d’Ivoire look like on the ground? How will it help farmers in Soubré? What do the farmers themselves think of the effort to train them in methods like grafting and pruning? You can find the answer to these questions in our new video on Vision for Change.
In the video, you will see the kinds
2012 was a banner year for the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative, and in particular for our Vision for Change projects in the Soubré region of Cote d’Ivoire. We saw marked improvement in the four key areas of productivity, community development, monitoring and evaluation, and coalition building. We thought we’d share with you just some of the important achievements we saw last year.
In the area
In the past few weeks, Jeff Morgan and I visited Cote d’Ivoire to review the progress of the community development plans of the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative’s Vision for Change program. We were encouraged to see the first development plans validated by a local government lead committee, the Validation Committee.
The vision of the program is that communities, supported by ANADER (National Agency for Rural
The Cocoa Barometer 2012 is out and it provides yet another snap shot into the urgency we must have as a sector to establish sustainable cocoa as the standard. The barometer is a joint initiative by several NGOs, and it provides an overview of the current sustainability efforts within the industry. This year’s barometer looked at initiatives in West Africa.
The barometer identifies some
Last week while at the World Cocoa Conference in Abidjan, we were pleased to hear that Mondelez International will be committing US $400 million to cocoa sustainability over the next 10 years, of which US $100 million will be invested in Côte d’Ivoire.
After hearing Tim Cofer’s remarks at the conference as well, we welcome this move, as it will take everyone in the
Last week, we had the pleasure of attending the World Cocoa Conference in Abidjan, where Barry Parkin, our Global Procurement and Sustainability Head, gave a keynote address to the main session.
While at the conference, we also had the opportunity to meet with several of our industry peers, and at the end of the week, we signed the “Abidjan Declaration” to confirm our support
Traveling to cocoa growing communities around the world has long been an important part of my job, and though it involves a lot of time in airplanes throughout the year, there’s just no substitute for seeing our projects in person and meeting the people involved.
On Sunday, November 18, I met with the chief and other leaders of Petit Bondoukou, one of the first
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
