Today’s Big Chocolate Industry Announcement – What It Means

Francais

Statement of Etelle Higonnet, Mighty Earth Africa Director

BONN, Germany, November 16- After a bitter past, the chocolate industry is off to a sweet new start when it comes to protecting forests, as it agreed today to end deforestation for cocoa in West Africa.

By promising to end forest destruction and restore previously destroyed areas, there’s finally new hope for a living future for the wildlife of West Africa.

This framework comes after Mighty Earth’s investigation into the cocoa industry in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which found that cocoa production is driving massive deforestation and environmental destruction, including inside protected areas like national parks and in some of the last chimpanzee and forest elephant habitat in West Africa.

Today's announcement represents the start of this work, not its end. More than 90 percent of Ivory Coast’s forests are already gone, and 7,000 square kilometers of Ghana’s forests were cleared between 2001 and 2014. Elephants, chimpanzees and some spectacular but little known species of monkeys have been pushed by the chocolate industry into tiny remnant

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patches. There is a lot of work indeed to be done before consumers can feel good again about consuming some of their favorite chocolate brands.  But consumers and West Africans can at least know that the chocolate industry and their governments are finally setting about the task in a serious way.

Today’s pact is a signature accomplishment for a true forest hero, the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles’ longstanding and profound commitment to rainforest conservation has translated into an initiative that may be remembered years from now as the moment West Africa’s forests began to grow back.

Of course, this breakthrough was a team effort. A plan of this ambition would simply not have been possible without the involvement of the Ghanaian and Ivorian governments, the steadfast labors and creativity of IDH, the sustainable trade initiative, and the World Cocoa Foundation.  The chocolate industry heard the voices of hundreds of thousands of consumers around the world who want to be able to feel good about their guilty pleasure. West African governments are listening to their citizens who want their natural heritage protected and restored. Thank you to the Arcus Foundation whose support made this work possible.

These good intentions must now translate into real action on the ground on a rapid timeline. In particular, the highly profitable companies that have sourced cocoa from national parks and protected areas for years need to make a sizable financial contribution to restoring these precious areas. This is an 100 billion dollar a year industry and the cost per company of doing the right thing would be a small fraction of a percent of their annual revenue. We’ll be watching to make sure this happens.

As an immediate next step, the chocolate industry must announce that it will extend its commitment to No Deforestation Cocoa to chocolate production around the world. It’s great that the industry is taking steps to protect chimpanzee habitat in Ivory Coast, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to eat a chocolate bar that killed an orangutan in Indonesia or a sloth in Peru.

Finally, the widespread use of pesticides in the cocoa industry has significantly impaired waterways, and threatened the health of local communities. The industry should reinforce its commitment to its workers and the communities who live near cocoa by banning hazardous pesticides, and moving quickly toward organic, shade-grown systems.

by Mighty Earth

Guest Post: Young Conservationist’s Response to Mighty’s Chocolate Investigation

I’m Hannah and I’m 10 years old. I live in Manchester, England. And here is how Mighty Earth inspired me to try and spread the word.

I read a brief newspaper article that mentioned how chocolate is damaging the environment and that Mighty Earth had done a report on the matter. So being a budding conservationist and nature lover I went onto Mighty Earth’s website to find out more. What l read there horrified me. Almost all major chocolate companies were sourcing their chocolate illegally from places where there used to be rain forests, therefore encouraging more forests to be cut down. It is threatening countless species and needs to stop!

I really wanted  to help so I emailed Mighty Earth to ask. They advised me to :

1. To try to by organic and fair trade chocolate.
2. Ask at cafes and shops where their chocolate has come from; even if they don’t know it makes them think.
3. Ask at my school and see if we can do a project on the matter.

I was super excited. I have told my friends at school and my sister (Alice); they are all really interested and enthusiastic. My class has researched the chocolate industry and made posters in computing time. I have told friends and family at various events and informed people in many other ways. I really feel like I’ve made a difference and truly hope that by writing this blog I will spread the word and inspire you to get involved.

by Mighty Earth

Six Maps that Explain the Ivory Coast Cocoa Crisis

Mighty partnered with MapHubs to map deforestation linked to Cocoa in the Ivory Coast. Leo Bottrill and Kris Carle, MapHubs’ Founders, explain through six maps how this was possible

The best way to describe mapping Ivory Coast deforestation is a club sandwich. The ubiquitous double decker sandwich requires piling layers, turkey, bacon, lettuce, and tomato on top of each other to a precarious height, which is held in place by a cocktail stick.

Like the unwieldy club sandwich, we assembled multiple map layers to interpret the scale and causes of deforestation in the Ivory Coast. To make managing multiple datasets and maps easy, we used MapHubs - our simple map making and data management technology - which, like the proverbial cocktail stick, keeps everything in its place.

Through six maps below, here are some insights into how cocoa has impacted the Ivory Coast’s forests.

Map 1 - Ivory Coast Deforestation in 1990, 2000, and 2015

We obtained the three datasets of forest loss in the Ivory Coast in 1990, 2000, and 2015 from the National Bureau of Technical Studies (BNETD). The exact methodology was not provided, but it appears to be NASA Landsat data. By computing the area of each pixel of the image, we obtained statistics for the entire country. As of 2015, we found that 3.7% of Ivory Coast’s land area remains forest.

We then overlaid this with protected areas and summarized the values inside each protected area polygon. This allowed us to rank the protected areas by their loss for each time range, total remaining forests, and percentage of remaining forest.

We also used Tree Cover loss data from University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) Lab (http://glad.umd.edu/). This dataset has tree cover canopy density for the year 2000, and tree cover loss for each year between 2000 and 2015. For this dataset we quantified the tree cover loss for each year based on the canopy density using increments of 10 between 20% and 80%. By removing these lost areas from the 2000 baseline and summarizing what was left at each tree canopy density interval, we found a similar result of 3.6% forest remaining, when using the 70% tree canopy density threshold. As the table above illustrates, the Ivory Coast’s forest loss spiked considerably after 2011.

The table below provides a ranking of the Ivorian parks: which have the highest % age of forest left, and which have the highest volume of forest left.

Map 2 - Deforestation inside Peko National Park

We took advantage a recent advance in satellite technology called “nano satellites”, which are tiny shoebox-sized satellites that fly in constellations around the earth. The advantage of nano satellites is they image the entire planet every day . This greatly increases the odds of obtaining a cloud-free image in the notoriously cloudy tropical rainforest. Planet (planet.com), a nano satellite company, generously gave Mighty Earth access to their imagery archive for the Ivory Coast. We used Planet’s imagery and their handy comparison tool to illustrate how Peko National Park was further deforested by encroaching cocoa growers between December 2015 and January 2017.

Map 3 - Mapping Cocoa in Scio Forest Reserve

When zoomed in closer, the impact of cocoa within the Ivory Coast’s protect areas becomes more apparent. This map shows deforestation inside Scio Forest Reserve caused predominantly by cocoa growers. Very little forest remains in the reserve.

Map 4 - Cocoa roads

To verify whether Scio had been converted for cocoa production, we used OpenStreetMap to map roads and settlements inside the park. DigitalGlobe - a satellite company - have made their premium high resolution base map available for tracing in OpenStreetMap. With this incredible imagery, we were able to map both the road network and human settlements throughout Scio.

We imported the road and settlement data into MapHubs. We then overlaid with park boundaries and add features such as streams and rivers. Finally, we used recent Planet imagery to identify cocoa growing areas and map cocoa households as well as the remaining forest areas. The resulting map illustrates that Scio’s forest has been almost completely converted to cocoa production with remnant forest found along the waterways and in small isolated patches.

Map 5 - Time Lapse Map for Deforestation

This gif illustrates how the pattern of deforestation inside Scio has been repeated across the Ivory Coast’s protected area system. Using GLAD Tree Cover Loss data, we animated a time series to illustrate deforestation from 2000 to 2014. The time series illustrates that during this period, deforestation largely occurred within the remaining forest reserves and national parks - the only areas left in the Ivory Coast with large stands of natural forest. Note the purple area is chimpanzee habitat, which along with southwest Ghana constitute some of the largest and last remaining chimpanzee habitats in West Africa.

Map 6 - Deforestation across West Africa

Cacao being a major driver of forest loss across West Africa with the Ivory Coast and Ghana that are the world’s #1 and #2 cacao producers have been particularly hard hit, notably in protected areas where the best quality forest remains. The bigger question is where next? As the table above illustrates, Liberia’s forests still remain largely intact but will likely come under increasing pressure from cocoa and other commodities such as oil palm.

Some final thoughts  

Cocoa supply chains can be mapping to the farm level

From our experience making these maps, it’s feasible to map all of the cocoa growing areas including settlements, households, and roads. This could largely be accomplished with OpenStreetMap using DigitalGlobe imagery. We also wrote an algorithm that can identify cocoa households, which should speed up the mapping process.

Once mapped, this data would provide a basis for building deforestation-free cocoa supply chains. All cocoa associations would need to provide GPS points for all member locations, which most currently don’t. This could then be verified from a national spatial database of households.

This would be relatively easy, fast, and inexpensive to do and could potentially be replicated in other forest countries.

Monitoring Forests is about to get a lot easier.

With support from Mighty, we are building a rapid response forest alert system, which will provide regular forest monitoring. Using GLAD Alerts from the University of Maryland coupled with Planet imagery, the tool will allow Mighty to monitor hundreds of different locations for deforestation. Mighty and their partners will receive regular PDF reports documenting deforestation and rankings We plan to make this application to other be used by government agencies, cocoa growers and purchasers, and watchdog organizations. Our goal is to make forest monitoring effective, simple, affordable to any group wishing tackling deforestation. If you would like more information, please contact us here.

MapHubs is a pretty handy cocktail stick for your maps

by Mighty Earth

The Chocolate Crisis

Mighty Earth Research Reveals Massive Deforestation Connected to World’s Largest Chocolate Sellers

By Etelle Higonnet

Today, the world’s largest chocolate makers met with the Prince of Wales to discuss solutions to the chocolate industry’s biggest problem: the destruction of rainforests to make way for large-scale chocolate production. Companies including Olam, Mars, Mondelēz International, The Hershey Company, and Nestlé were at the table to see how they can take steps to ensure that customers don’t have to feel guilt for biting into their favorite brand of chocolate.

Deforestation for chocolate has ravaged forests in West Africa which are now at less than 18% their former size. With our global appetite for chocolate at an all-time high, we’re now seeing a race to expand cacao production, with plantations encroaching across Africa’s forests and in the Amazon rainforest, destroying chimpanzee and endangered animals’ habitats. Peru alone has seen a 5-fold increase in cacao (as the raw beans that produce cocoa and then chocolate are called) production between 1990 and 2013.

Mighty Earth just undertook a new mapping of tree cover loss from 2000-2014 in the chocolate producing regions of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and found new evidence of massive deforestation.

1. 1. We found a total loss inside protected forest areas of 209,577 acres in Ghana and 1,196,879 acres in Côte d’Ivoire from 2000 to 2014, and additional loss in both countries outside those areas.
   2. Both legally protected forests and other forests are vanishing faster in cacao-producing regions than other regions. Deforestation of protected areas in the cacao-growing region was almost double what it is outside of cacao growing regions.
      
   3. In response to rising demand combined with too little attention to sourcing from major chocolate companies, the pace of deforestation in chocolate regions has worsened in both countries since 2004. Tree cover loss has been climbing especially alarmingly since 2012, until 2014 when the last maps were available.
   4. Côte d’Ivoire is losing its forests faster than any other nation in Africa. Ghana’s rate is alarmingly close.
      
   5. Some of the deforestation is happening in the largest remaining chimpanzee habitats, particularly in Western Côte d’Ivoire and Southwest Ghana.
   6. In Ghana the non-protected forests are especially vulnerable – but even the “forest reserves” (with lower legal protection status) are being devastated relative to official “national parks” (with stronger legal status that makes them capable of resisting encroachments). In contrast, some of the most vulnerable areas in Côte d’Ivoire are actually within parks.
      

We created an interactive map of deforestation across the entire cacao regions of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire from 2000 to 2014; and we animated a zoomed-in time series of deforestation in two areas where cacao has driven deforestation in and around chimpanzee habitat. Our mapping provides incontrovertible visual evidence of what journalists, activists, and biologists on the ground have been saying: chocolate is killing West African forests and wildlife like chimpanzees on a massive scale.

Before the chocolate industry’s insatiable hunger for new lands drives more deforestation, industry leaders must act. Chocolate makers should forthrightly address the chocolate industry’s dark past of forest destruction, embrace accountability, and adopt an industry-wide mechanism to eliminate deforestation (which has found success in the soy industry), for instance by focusing expansion only on Africa and other cacao-producing region’ millions of acres of degraded land. Other commodities like soy and palm have already signed on to similar sustainability reforms, whilst the chocolate industry is still busy greenwashing, delaying, and clearing thousands of hectares of carbon-rich, biodiverse forest in its quest for cheap new sources of chocolate.

The Prince of Wales has played a critical role many times in marshaling major companies and governments to take action for forests. Prince Charles’ involvement provides hope that chocolate lovers may soon be able to have more confidence that their favorite bar isn’t destroying great apes’ last West African habitat.

CONTEXT

• Chocolate global trends threaten forests: We consume close to 3 million tons of chocolate and other cacao products annually, but every year global demand goes up by about 2 to 5%, creating pressure on forests.

• Cacao has been a historical disaster for West African forests: Cacao production doubled from 1987-2007, causing deforestation, losses of biodiversity and high carbon emissions. (CIFOR). Cacao production is responsible for much of the loss of the rainforest of West Africa, a former global biodiversity hotspot, which shrank down to 18% of its original area by 2000. (Sustainability Science).

• Cacao is a disaster for Ivorian forests: The EU and the Ivoirian Forestry Ministry both estimated that about 80% of the country’s forests have disappeared from 1960 to 2010, much of it for cacao. An estimated 70% of illegal deforestation is related to planting cacao, and 12% of the country’s cacao is produced inside national parks. UNEP estimated 10,000 farmers had invaded the Western Cavally forest, one of the last protected areas in the country and which provides crucial habitat to chimpanzees and elephants. (The Chicago Council).

• Great apes are disappearing: “Researchers surveying primates in 23 protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire encountered scenes of destruction nearly everywhere: illegal cacao farms had encroached on two thirds of the areas studied, causing a dramatic collapse of primate populations” like the Roloway monkey, and chimpanzees. (Rainforest Rescue).

• Cacao is becoming a driver of Deforestation in the DRC: A study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the four major cacao growing regions “found that cacao expansion could lead to the loss of 176-395 square kilometres of forest in the next decade”, especially in Mambasa, Equatorial Province, Mbandaka, Bikoro and Lukolela.

• Cacao is threatening the Amazon rainforest too: Cacao producers have now turned to South America, especially Peru, which has seen a nearly five-fold increase in cacao production between 1990 and 2013. Satellite images in 2012 showed United Cacao  deforesting 2,000 hectares (nearly 5,000 acres) for a cacao plantation, encroaching dramatically on the carbon-rich, biodiverse Amazon rainforest in Peru. “Matt Finer of the Amazon Conservation Association used Landsat imagery to chronicle the clearing month-by-month and prove that the area was previously primary forest. Meanwhile, Greg Asner of Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science used airborne LiDAR technology to estimate that the patch of forest contained an average of 122 metric tons of carbon per hectare (54.4 tons per acre).” (WRI).

• The emissions of one chocolate bar: “Cadbury estimates that 169g of carbon dioxide equivalent are emitted into the atmosphere for each 49g Dairy Milk chocolate bar,” not counting emissions from deforestation. But if the same milk chocolate bar were made from ‘deforestation cacao’ like United Cacao’s in Peru, it would have nearly double the carbon footprint, and a dark chocolate bar would have triple the climate impact. (WRI).

• Cacao drives deforestation and labor abuse in similar ways: The global market for cacao was around $100 billion in 2015, and top chocolate companies make sizeable profits but insist on ever lower costs, driving illegality both in their quest for cheap labor (including child labor) and cheap land (including forests). Cacao employs 5-6 million farmers, mostly smallholders living on under $1.25/day. Most cacao farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana earn roughly $0.54 and $0.82 per day cultivating the crop. The chocolate industry is notorious for labor rights abuses, highlighted by campaigns like the video “Hershey's Chocolate, Kissed by Child Labor.” A 2015 report by the U.S. Department of Labor found that, “21 percent more children are illegally laboring on cacao farms in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire than five years ago.”

• The cacao sector can reform and commit to true responsible production: The industry is far from any sustainability commitments seen from leaders in the palm oil and paper industries or in the Brazil soy moratorium. The chocolate industry is not even close to addressing illegal and legal deforestation, the decimation of national parks, illegal cross-border sales, slavery, child labor, land-grabbing, and pauperization of vulnerable smallholders. But they can change. What is needed is the political will for the industry to turn the corner, and bring together companies like Mars, Nestle, and Mondelez; Cargill, Barry Callebaut, and Dreyfus, Olam, alongside the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, and international/regional banks.

by Mighty Earth