Protecting Our Planet

The context

Over the next decades, climate change is expected to threaten many regions across the world including those where cocoa is grown. Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate change, avoiding erosion, increasing biodiversity and providing livelihoods for millions of farmers, as well as a secure food supply for a growing global population.

However, increasing pressure from a wide range of sources, including logging and other crop production, may push smallholder cocoa farmers to expand further into protected areas in order to meet the increased demand for cocoa, trapping them in a vicious cycle that creates long-term problems for forests and farmers alike.

Mitigating the impacts of climate change and ending deforestation are crucial to our ability to produce enough food for everyone. The interrelated socioeconomic factors include market prices of cocoa, policies on land use and enforcement of forest protection laws. This challenge must be addressed holistically to ensure a sustainable, secure supply of cocoa for generations to come.

Our target

Zero deforestation in our direct and indirect cocoa supply chain by 2030

Our Protect Our Planet Strategic Action Plan is helping us take concrete action to end deforestation in our supply chain and contribute to reforestation.

How are we achieving our goal?

We are addressing the connected issues affecting natural landscapes, agriculture and farmer resilience in the five countries where we directly source cocoa, as well as within our indirect supply chain. One of the hallmarks of our approach is supply chain transparency, which we enable through farmer mapping and bean traceability.

Mapping at-risk areas provides a baseline from which to measure our efforts to tackle deforestation, as well as allowing us to tailor our initiatives to where the needs are greatest. We have committed to mapping all farms in our direct supply chain. We have started with farms participating in our Cargill Cocoa Promise, of which we have mapped 72 percent.

This is helping us to understand where deforestation risks are present and to implement remediation activities, such as agroforestry – the deliberate integration of trees on farms and across the wider agricultural landscape.

Through the Cargill Cocoa Promise program, we are also training farmers in other Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) to practice efficient, environmentally sound and safe farming. This ultimately allows them to increase the profitability and productivity of their existing land without encroaching into forests.

We are also one of the original signatories of the industry’s Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI) committed to no further conversion of any forestland and ending deforestation in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. All signatories are committed to annual reporting on progress. These are our Annual CFI Progress Reports: 2019 and 2020.

Our work towards eliminating deforestation is rooted in our broader company commitment to transforming our agricultural supply chains to be deforestation-free, through prioritized supply chain policies and time-bound action plans as outlined in the Cargill Policy on Forests.

Our results

• We have achieved 100 percent traceability of our direct supply chain in Ghana.
• We have mapped a total of 151,558 farmers in the five origin countries from which we directly source our cocoa.
• We have trained all the farmers in our direct supply chain on more sustainable farming practices, including benefits of tree shade cover for increased crop resilience.
• In Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, we have worked with 12 cooperatives to engage 7,500 farmers in nurturing and planting over 350,000 shade trees.