Abstract Tropical forests are vanishing at an unprecedented rate due to the expansion of commodity production, while climate change is putting increasing strain on food systems. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana produce over half of the world’s cocoa, a multi-billion-dollar industry, yet most cocoa producers in these two countries live below the poverty line, and economic vulnerability is further exacerbated by climate change and ongoing deforestation largely driven by cocoa expansion. Companies have recently begun implementing policies to promote forest restoration, halt deforestation, and improve farmers’ livelihoods, but there is increasing evidence that these efforts are falling short in terms of both effectiveness and equity. This perspective article argues that several critical design flaws are central to the short-comings of these company policies that are likely to be exacerbated with the new EU deforestation regulation. The first problem is that they target a sub-optimal scale, focusing largely on individual suppliers or on landscape approaches that are only partially implemented, rather than on more manageable supply shed scales. The second flaw is that they focus on tree planting and agroforestry over conservation of remaining forests. We propose that cocoa firms and importing countries embrace more transformative policy approaches that target the correct scale and ambition to tackle structural issues influencing supply chain sustainability and achieve synergies between environmental and social outcomes. First, policies must be integrated in a mitigation and conservation hierarchy, focusing on conservation, not just tree planting. Second, companies must expand their approach beyond their individual supply chains to the broader supply sheds where they source.
Cammelli et al. (Thu,) studied this question.