How one team in West Africa is protecting forests in our cocoa supply chain, step by step

On the cocoa plantations of Côte d'Ivoire, smartphones in hand, Gertrude Loua and her team are making maps.

They’re recording the precise boundaries of the farms that supply us with cocoa. They’re training farmers on best practices in management, data collection and certification. And they’re playing a key role in identifying parts of our supply chain that might be at risk for deforestation.

“It helps us understand where the risks are,” said Luoa, monitoring and evaluation coordinator for Cargill West Africa, “What’s close to forests or protected areas? Where do we need to take a closer look?”

It’s an important step in helping us understand where our cocoa comes from to uphold our commitments not to source from critical protected areas and transform our supply chains to be deforestation-free.

Cargill Global Sustainability Leader Jill Kolling discussed the process in-depth in a recent article on GreenBiz.com. Read the piece here.

Our Cocoa & Forests Initiative commitment.

Cargill is one of the signatories of The Cocoa & Forests Initiative (CFI) – a public-private partnership launched in 2017 bringing together the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana as well as leading cocoa and chocolate companies committed to end deforestation and restore forest areas.

The initiative is led by the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), IDH - the Sustainable Trade Initiative, and The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit (ISU). As part of our CFI commitment, we together with all signatories, have published annual progress reports for Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Read our latest report here.