Commitment to Sustainability

Today’s sustainability challenges are too big to be tackled by individual companies, or even individual sectors or countries. To overcome the trends we are witnessing, we need a concerted global effort involving multiple stakeholders. That is why we welcome global initiatives such as the Paris Climate Agreement, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The Sustainable Development Goals aim to unite governments, business, NGOs and communities across the world behind a shared ambition and common targets for global change.

How is Cargill playing its part? Our Cargill Cocoa Promise goals are closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. We believe in the power of partnerships to achieve our goals and we work with many organizations – from small, recently formed farmer cooperatives to national governments, the international food industry and sustainability organizations. These include ANADER, CARE International, Swisscontact, International Finance Corporation, World Cocoa Foundation, national governments and many other valued partners.

We work with each of our partners in different ways, but with the consistent goal of developing our programs so that they become self-sustaining. Partnership working enables us to engage with a variety of stakeholders and gives us the opportunity to understand different perspectives.

The power of cocoa partnerships

Some of our closest and most essential partnerships are with farmer organizations. Together, we develop long-term solutions that enable them, and us, to do more for farmers. These partnerships allow us to implement our many different farmer training, farm development, and community support programs, which help to improve the livelihoods of farmers and their communities. One example of partnership working, specifically in the cocoa supply chain, is CocoaAction.

All our partnerships are created with one fundamental principle: that partners retain the freedom to act individually, while achieving even more collectively. Going forward, we will invest in partnerships that focus on driving transformational change in the areas of market demand, accountability, public sector governance and farmer organizations. We want to act as a data-driven thought leader, sharing our expertise with industry, governments and civil society organizations to address significant sustainability issues in the sector, together.

Supporting our goals

Our work in partnerships underpins all of our Cargill Cocoa Promise goals, particularly our goal ‘Taking action together’.