Skip to main content

Is your chocolate bar fuelling deforestation in West Africa?

LONDON: Your afternoon chocolate bar may be fuelling climate change, destroying protected forests and threatening elephants, chimpanzees and hippos in West Africa, research suggests.
Well-known brands, such as Mars and Nestle, are buying through global traders cocoa that is grown illegally in dwindling national parks and reserves in Ivory Coast and Ghana, environmental group Mighty Earth said.
“Every consumer of chocolate is a part of either the problem or the solution,” Etelle Higonnet, campaign director at Mighty Earth, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“You can choose to buy ethical chocolate. Or you’re voting with your dollar for deforestation.”
Nestle did not immediately respond to requests for comment while Mars said in an email: “We take a responsible approach to sourcing cocoa and have committed to source 100 percent certified sustainable cocoa by 2020.”
Both companies have committed to join the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, a major effort to end deforestation in the global cocoa supply chain, launched in March.
Almost one-third of 23 protected natural areas in Ivory Coast that researchers visited in 2015 had been almost entirely converted to illegal cocoa plantations, the report said.
Researchers said the practice is so widespread that villages of tens of thousands of people, along with churches and schools, have sprung up in national parks to support the cocoa economy.
Ivory Coast, Francophone West Africa’s biggest economy, is the world’s top cocoa grower.
While the bulk of its 1 million cocoa farmers ply their trade legally, Washington-based Mighty Earth estimates about a third of cocoa is grown illegally in protected areas.
Deforestation for cocoa happens in sight of authorities and chocolate traders are aware of it, they said.
Loss of natural forests is problematic because they act as a home for the region’s wildlife, and a key weapon against climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide – a major driver of climate change – as they grow.
Available land for new cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast ran out long ago, so farmers have moved into parks and reserves, taking advantage of a decade of political crisis that ended in 2011.
Ivory Coast’s now has about 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres) of natural forest, a fifth of what it had at independence in 1960, according to European Union figures. Most of the losses have been due to expanding agriculture.
The government has struggled to evict farmers from forest reserves amid accusations in 2013 of human rights abuses by security forces.
Details of the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, which is initially focusing on Ivory Coast and Ghana, will be announced by November’s global climate talks in Bonn.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

US drone strike kills leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militants: spokesman

                                DERA ISMAIL KHAN:  The leader of Pakistani militant group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, who planned some of the deadliest suicide bombings in Pakistan over the last year, died on Thursday of wounds sustained in a US drone strike in Afghanistan, a spokesman said. “Our leader, Omar Khalid Khorasani, was wounded in one of the recent drone strikes in Afghanistan. He was wounded badly, and today he was martyred,” Asad Mansoor, a Jamaat-ul-Ahrar spokesman, said by telephone.The killing comes ahead of American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit next week and is likely to further ease tensions between the often-wary allies, as Islamabad has been asking Washington for years to target militants who attack inside Pakistan and then hide over the border in Afghanistan. A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has in the past also backed Middle East-based Islamic St...

कुन प्रदेश को अस्थाई राजधानी कहाँ ? प्रदेश प्रमुख को ?

बुधबार ,३ माघ ( काठमाडौँ ) सरकारले आज सात ओटै प्रदेश को अस्थाई मुकाम र प्रदेश प्रमुख तोकेको छ | बुधबार बसेको मन्त्रि परिसद को बैठक ले सात ओटै प्रदेश को अस्थाई मुकाम र प्रदेश प्रमुख तोकेको हो | जसमा प्रदेश १ को बिराटनगर ,२ को जनकपुर ,३ को हेटौडा र ४ को मुकाम पोखरा तोकेको छ | तेस्तै प्रदेश ५ को रुपन्देही ,६ को सुर्खेत तथा ७ को धनगढी तोकिएको छ |  पदेश प्रमुख मा प्रदेश १ मा डाक्टर गोविन्द सुब्बा ,२ मा रत्नेस्वोरलाल कायस्थ ,३ मा अनुराधा कोइराला, ४ मा बाबुराम कुँवर, ५ मा उमाकान्त झा ,६ मा दुर्गा प्रसाद खनाल र ७ मा मोहनराज मल्ल लाई निउक्त गर्ने सरकारले निर्णय गरेको छ |

How much is a life worth, ask activists fighting slavery?

LONDON:  From $7 for a Rohingya refugee to $750 for a North Korean “slave wife”, human rights activists have voiced concerns that it is becoming increasingly easy to enslave another human being as the cost plummets. The average modern-day slave is sold for $90-100 compared to the equivalent of $40,000 some 200 years ago, said Kevin Bales, Professor of Contemporary Slavery at Britain’s University of Nottingham.“There has been a collapse in the price of slaves over the last 50 years,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual Trust Conference in London, which focuses on women’s empowerment and modern slavery. Pointing to a photo of boys hauling rocks in Nepal “like beasts of burden”, he said their parents would have sold them for $5-$10. Children are so cheap that if they get injured or fall in a ravine their slave master abandons them, Bales said. “They understand it’s less expensive to acquire a new child than to call a doctor,” he added. Bales attributed the fall...