encouraging sustainable, responsible cocoa growing

Entry from Tracey Duffey, World Cocoa Foundation

Last week I traveled from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Makassar (also known as Ujung Pandang) in South Sulawesi in Indonesia to meet with cocoa farmers and cooperatives who benefited from the SUCCESS Alliance Indonesia project. I also visited our World Cocoa Foundation Members working in the region.

It is interesting to note that the SUCCESS Alliance Indonesia program operated from 2001 to 2005 and trained over 60,000 cocoa farmers on better tree crop management - particularly on how to graft their aging cocoa trees (which can also be termed “rehabilitation” in cocoa lingo). The average age of the majority of cocoa trees that I visited during my trip were 12-18 years which is quite a vast change from the 1-5 year old trees I saw in Vietnam the week before. As a tree ages, its production of cocoa pods significantly reduces. The size and quality of the beans found inside the cocoa pod also decreases which can greatly affect the crop yield.

The purpose of grafting is to graft a good stock of budwood onto the older tree so once it grows the old tree will eventually be cut away except for its trunk. The grafting rejuvenates the tree producing more cocoa pods and larger beans inside the pod. Here is an example:

For three days, I traveled over 950 kms in total by road throughout the cocoa growing area of South Sulawesi (including Masamba, Noling, and Pinrang to name a few).

Here is a traditional farmer’s house next to the family’s cocoa farm. One thing I noticed immediately was the number of satellite dishes outside the farmers’ houses. And many farmers in the region were building cement houses to replace the traditional wood house I photographed.

I was fortunate to travel with 4 Indonesian colleagues who work on the Cocoa Sustainability Partnership (CSP) - some being former staff and master trainers of SUCCESS Alliance so I could not have asked for better resource guides to show me cocoa cultivation in South Sulawesi. They were quite well-known in the region.

If you have not yet heard of the CSP, this partnership includes various relevant offices within the Indonesian Government, ASKINDO (the Indonesia Cocoa Association – their membership includes all businesses that deal with cocoa), Universities, the International Finance Corporation/PENSA project; Mars Inc., research institutes and other local partners.

The CSP has helped to consolidate the training curriculum provided to cocoa farmers by any one of many resources teaching cocoa farmers better practices. These include government extension offices, donor funded projects, and local institutes. Stakeholders realized that training programs varied in content and quality with some trainings directly contradicting others - which at times could cause confusion for the farmers who were not sure what techniques to implement (and rightfully so). To address these issues, cocoa stakeholders worked together to agree upon a training curriculum that would be used by all partners so cocoa farmers would learn consistent and efficient methods of managing their cocoa trees. I am sure you can imagine the amount of work that has gone in to meeting this objective and developing the partnership.

During my travels, we met with farmers who benefited from the SUCCESS Alliance project and cooperatives that are now selling their unfermented beans directly to many of our World Cocoa Foundation Member companies such as OLAM, Cargill, PT Effem Indonesia (A Mars Inc Company), and Armajaro. While visiting one of OLAM’s new buying stations in North Luwu, the head of a farmer’s cooperative brought 8 bags of cocoa beans to be weighed and quality checked for purchase. I watched the entire quality check process from weighing, measuring the moisture content, taking the bean samples from three areas of the bag, and checking for waste and cleanliness of the beans. The farmer cooperative received a premium for their beans due to their quality check.

In this photo they are weighing the bag and preparing to do the moisture test with the handheld pointer that will be inserted in several random areas of the bag to record the average level of moisture.