Category: Forests & trees

The World Cocoa Foundation is offering a guide to the cocoa industry on sustainability principles that focus on equitable profit, labour standards and environmental issues.

That’s from a press release. There’s something similar on the World Cocoa Foundations’s blog. But I can’t find anywhere on the WCF website the teach-yourself-sustainable-cacao-farming document that I was foolishly expecting.

I guess we’ll have to make do with some general aims:

The sustainability initiative commits the foundation and its members to working toward three categories; profit, people and planet.

For the people category, the aim is for healthy and thriving cocoa-farming communities, where international labour standards are followed and farming practices are safe.

The planet category refers to responsible, sound environmental stewardship in cocoa-farming communities where soil and water are conserved and Integrated Pest Management to limit the use of agricultural chemicals, protecting the fragile tropical ecosystem.

And in terms of profit, the aim is to improve equitable economic returns for farmers built upon expanding entrepreneurial skills, stronger and more effective farmer associations, and more productive, profitable farming practices.

and a bunch of example projects. Not much about the importance of genetic diversity, alas.