On June 17, 2021, Corporate Accountability Lab joined the University of Ghana School of Law, the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Center for International Human Rights, and SEND Ghana to launch the report, COCOBOD’s Unrealised Potential: Promoting Human Rights, Welfare, and the Environment in Ghana’s Cocoa-Growing Communities.
Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world, home to over 800,000 smallholder farmers who make up about 60 percent of Ghana’s agricultural force. Despite the massive profits that global chocolate companies earn, poverty is pervasive in Ghana’s cocoa-growing communities. According to the 2020 Cocoa Barometer, only about 9 percent of cocoa farming households in Ghana earn a living income, meaning that an overwhelming majority of farmers and their families live in poverty.
Ghana’s cocoa industry is controlled by the Ghana Cocoa Board, or COCOBOD, a government agency that runs the cocoa industry. COCOBOD has enormous power over the cocoa industry and is involved in all steps of cocoa production, from providing inputs to farmers, to regulating who can purchase and export cocoa. In 2019, Ghana received a $600 million syndicated loan from the African Development Bank and other private lenders. The purpose of the loan was to maximize cocoa production and improve farmers’ livelihoods. As a prerequisite for the loan, COCOBOD had to establish an Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) with a grievance and redress mechanism. The ESMS aims to identify and manage environmental and social risks and opportunities to protect the environment and improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers and others in Ghana’s cocoa sector.
The report examines COCOBOD’s ESMS and its grievance and redress mechanism and finds that while the grievance and redress mechanism could be a powerful tool for cocoa farmers, workers, and their communities, the ESMS and grievance and redress mechanism remain unfulfilled promises.
To evaluate COCOBOD’s grievance and redress mechanism, the authors created the PEER Principles – Principles for Effective and Efficient Redress – a synthesis of essential components of global standards and best practices. The PEER Principles include three levels of evaluation: Good, Moderate, or Poor for ten principles. These evaluators represent the extent to which COCOBOD’s grievance and redress mechanism meets each of 10 PEER Principles’ component criteria, and they provide the overall evaluation of the mechanism. Based on the author’s analysis, the grievance mechanism earns a score of 33%, or Poor.
COCOBOD has enormous power in the Ghanaian cocoa industry, but this power means it also has a responsibility to cocoa-growing communities and the environment. Yet poverty, harmful forms of child labor, and environmental degradation pervade Ghana’s cocoa sector. The ESMS and its component grievance and redress mechanism present a unique opportunity for COCOBOD to begin fulfilling its promise. COCOBOD must seize this opportunity to strengthen, enhance, and fully implement the ESMS and grievance and redress mechanism as a step towards protecting the environment and promoting the human rights and welfare of people living and working in Ghana’s cocoa-growing communities.
You can read the full report here. A link to a video of the launch event will be online soon.
The launch event included an introduction to the report by Brian Citro (Project Director, Report Co-Author, and Human Rights Lawyer and Independent Researcher); a Launch and Keynote address by Commissioner Joseph Akanjolenur Whittal of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (Ghana); and a panel discussion moderated by CAL’s Executive Director, Charity Ryerson with panelists Barima Akwasi Amankwaah (Report Co-Author and National Coordinator at the Ghana NGO Coalition on the rights of the Child), Glen Asomaning (Report Co-Author and Operations Director at the Nature and Development Foundation), Edward Kareweh (General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers’ Union of Ghana), and Samuel Mawutor (Senior Advisor at Mighty Earth).
Allie Brudney is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab.
