Connecting the dots: Progress measurement in the cocoa sector

Written by: William Saab (Senior Consultant), supported by Eva Schouten (Analyst).  Also posted on LinkedIn.

Reflecting on the 4th World Cocoa Conference in Berlin

The global cocoa sector agrees that there is a need for a more sustainable sector and that the sector faces critical and complex issues that we need to tackle collectively. This is the reason that 1,500 stakeholders, ranging from producers and producer organizations, civil society, private and public sectors of both origin and consuming countries, came together at the 4th World Cocoa Conference (WCC) in Berlin from 22-25 April. At this conference, I was asked to share recommendations in a plenary session on how the cocoa sector can start measuring progress towards becoming a more sustainable sector.

At the conference, I was inspired by honest and high-energy conversations. Various critical challenges of the sector were raised by different stakeholders, all with an interesting point of view. These topics included:

• Living income
• Diversification
• Price volatility
• Child labor
• Productivity
• Climate change
• Policy and coordination

And of course many others.

Haven’t we heard all of this before?

Now let’s be honest, these topics are not new. The Cocoa Barometer, published by a global consortium of civil society organizations called The Voice Network, has outlined most of these challenges in each of the past three editions, including the recently published 2018 edition. Over the last few years, at conferences and in declarations, we have repeatedly talked about these topics. Below you see that for many of these issues, we have even been talking about them for more than 10 years:

Do you feel like playing cocoa bingo?

Of course new topics also arise, but in the cocoa sector we have been talking about many of the same issues for quite some time. Perhaps at the next World Cocoa Conference, we can hand out a bingo card to all participants and checkmark each of the familiar topics being raised.

Systemic challenges require systemic solutions

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to be negative. There is a reason why these challenges keep getting raised. These challenges are systemic in nature and therefore among the most complex challenges to solve, as they cannot be solved in isolation, and cannot be solved by one stakeholder alone. Take price for example: just increasing the farm gate price will almost certainly increase the amount of cocoa farmers and/or the hectares under cultivation, thereby increasing production, which would likely lower the price once again. Likewise, increasing yields might work for a small number of producers, but to be achieved at scale, it must be complemented with the creation of alternatives inside and outside of farming, as otherwise it will only lead to overproduction and price collapses.

Systemic issues are among the most complex to solve: they require a high level of coordination and a long term approach. As a senior consultant at NewForesight, I work on these kinds of challenges every day, across many different sectors. In our experience, to resolve these systemic challenges, broadly the same steps are needed, listed below as questions to be addressed:

Here comes the good news

What if I told you that we are already halfway there? Have you heard of the Global Cocoa Agenda? This document, essentially a roadmap towards a sustainable cocoa sector, was already agreed upon in 2012 by various stakeholders, including producers and producer organizations, governments, private sector and civil society. Its signatories include producer organizations, governments, traders, processors, brands, civil society, and industry associations and platforms. It already contains the first 4 of the 6 elements listed above. It outlines a vision for the sector (1) and identifies barriers (2) across four tracks – sustainable production, consumption, value chain and strategic management – which, not coincidentally, were also the four tracks used in the 2018 Berlin Declaration. The Global Cocoa Agenda goes further, and lists commitments and actions to tackle these challenges (3). It even allocates actions and commitments to different stakeholders, encompassing producing governments, consuming governments, private sectors, producers, civil society, and international organizations (4).

I’ve worked on systemic challenges in a lot of sectors, and I can tell you, this is pretty special. There aren’t many sectors out there where such a broad set of stakeholders has agreed on a common agenda as we have done within the cocoa sector.

Let’s start to connect the dots

In case you think I’m being too positive, let me state the obvious: it has been 6 years since the Global Cocoa Agenda was agreed upon and we continue to talk about the same issues without measuring or reporting progress at a sector level. This is not good for the credibility either of the Global Cocoa Agenda or of the cocoa sector’s commitments to sustainability.

While we are very focused on getting different stakeholders involved to set the agenda for a sustainable cocoa sector, the measurement of the progress and continuous learning – steps 5 and 6 above – are lacking. Already in 2009 at the second meeting of the Roundtable for a Sustainable Cocoa Economy in Trinidad and Tobago, the official declaration emphasized the importance “to develop a system of monitoring of activities aimed at achieving sustainability in the cocoa sector”. This has not happened yet.

The ICCO Consultative Board (mandated with monitoring and coordination of the Global Cocoa Agenda) and the ICCO Secretariat (the central coordination body to monitor effective implementation of the Global Cocoa Agenda) asked NewForesight to develop a Monitoring Framework for the Global Cocoa Agenda. To do this, we worked closely with a working group that includes different members of the ICCO Consultative Board: BDSI, GISCO, the International Cocoa Initiative, UTZ, the VOICE Network, and the World Cocoa Foundation.

You may be thinking: do we really need another measuring framework? Do we really need more frameworks, more reporting, more indicators? While I agree that we don’t need yet another framework for the sake of having a framework, we do need accountability, transparency, and most importantly credibility when it comes to living up to our commitments towards a sustainable cocoa sector.

We have tried to avoid the risk of yet another framework that will not be implemented, by keeping this one simple, light, credible, insightful, and feasible.

In short, the monitoring framework we have created is designed to answer 2 questions:

1. What is the state of the cocoa sector? Measured through impact indicators
2. Are the various stakeholders living up to their commitments? Measured through action and commitment indicators