Chocolate Report PDF - Fair Trade Barrie

ack into the community, into projects
such as water supplies, latrines, crop
improvement, gender relations and
education.
For Kuapa Kokoo owning a third of
The Day Chocolate Company is a
source of great pride, as well as status
on the international market. The Day
Chocolate Company has been
invaluable to them. It has enabled
the company to gain a better
understanding of how the market
works and their role within it.
Ironically, most of the growers
had never seen much less tasted
chocolate.
How Co-op shoppers will help
The Co-op’s initiative will lead to a
doubling of the Fairtrade chocolate
market in the UK.
Kuapa Kokoo currently sells about 650
tonnes of cocoa to the Fairtrade market
each year. The Co-op’s requirements
will increase Kuapa Kokoo’s Fairtrade
sales by a massive 30 per cent.
Extra income is particularly needed now.
The unusually wet weather has led to an
epidemic of black pod blight in West
Africa, which has decimated cocoa
farms: some growers have lost half their
crop to the disease. All this combined
with recent instabilities in the Ivory
Coast and bulk buying of cocoa by a
trading company means the market is
currently in an extraordinary position.
The normal rules of supply and demand
dictate that when demand for a
commodity is high, and supply is low,
the price of that commodity will rise.
The market is susceptible to yo-yoing
price levels, making life unpredictable
and even tougher for growers.
It’s at a time of volatility like this that
Fairtrade really helps, giving farmers
the stability of a guaranteed minimum
price and a long-term contract, plus
the social premium paid on top.
The minimum price the Co-op will pay
is $1750 per tonne of cocoa. Of this,
$1600 goes to Kuapa Kokoo Limited, to
pay the growers for their cocoa and
invest in the Fairtrade co-operative. The
balance of $150 is the social premium,
which goes to the Farmers’ Trust for
investment in community schemes.
To illustrate the scale of the benefit, we
have estimated how the annual Co-op
contract will make a difference to two
crucial aspects of life at Kuapa Kokoo:
sending children to school
(paid for by growers from the
basic $1600 per tonne)
building new water wells
(paid for by the Trust from the
$150 per tonne social premium).
The calculation is based on prices and
exchange rates for the current trading
year, with effect from March 2002.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Brian Moody
Sending children to primary school
Primary education is state funded in
Ghana, but families need to spend
15,000 cedis a year per child on school
books if they are to attend. This is a
difficult cost to bear. The Co-op cocoa
Building new wells
The Co-op will pay the Fairtrade social
premium of $150 per tonne, to be used
for community projects as decided
democratically by the community.
New water wells are an urgent priority,
costing about 10 million cedis each.
will bring in 2.46 billion cedis per year.
So in the first year the Co-op contract
would pay for 164,000 children to
attend primary school, if all the money
were spent this way.
The Co-op social premium will bring in
240 million cedis per year, which would
be enough to build 25 new water wells.
Each well has the potential to benefit
an entire village - village sizes vary
from 250 to 3500 people.
These are just illustrations - of course, it is for the farmers to decide how they
want to invest the extra money.
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