Do environmentally-friendly cocoa farms yield social and economic co-benefits?

Abstract

Downstream companies in chocolate supply chains are increasingly engaged in improving the sustainability of cocoa production, which requires a multidimensional understanding of cocoa farms' sustainability performance. However, prior research has insufficiently addressed the multiple sustainability dimensions of cocoa production or the interrelationships between dimensions. This study explores farm sustainability using our comprehensive data set of 395 cocoa farms in Ecuador and Uganda and identifies social and economic co-benefits and trade-offs of environmentally-friendly cocoa production. For this, farms were grouped according to environmental performance and then compared. This approach revealed lowest sustainability performance in the social and governance dimension. We identified important social and economic co-benefits of environmentally-friendly cocoa production regarding human health benefits from reduced pesticide use and resource conservation for farms' long-term productivity, although at the expense of farm investments and profitability. Future interventions require approaches that target underrepresented sustainability issues and enable synergistic effects between environmental, social, and economic sustainability for cocoa farms.