John Oliver on chocolate: ‘For all the money and happiness surrounding chocolate, there is one group that doesn’t get to share in it, and that is the farmers who grow cocoa in the first place.’John Oliver on chocolate: ‘For all the money and happiness surrounding chocolate, there is one group that doesn’t get to share in it, and that is the farmers who grow cocoa in the first place.
Unfortunately, “for all the money and happiness surrounding chocolate, there is one group that doesn’t get to share in it, and that is the farmers who grow cocoa in the first place,” he continued. Most farmers, he noted, haven’t ever tasted chocolate because they can’t afford it. More than 60% of cocoa comes from two west African countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, in which 30-58% of residents earn a gross income below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
Companies add real value to the process, he noted, “but there are clearly massive disparities in who reaps the benefits of this extremely profitable industry.” Though mechanisms exist to stabilize the division of profit, such as minimum prices for cocoa, they are difficult to enforce and not enough to offset the costs of farming.
Companies have internal initiatives to support fair trade, but “the reality hasn’t remotely lived up to the rhetoric,” said Oliver, citing one investigation that went to one address on Mondelēz’s Cocoa Life website in 2022 and immediately found child laborers harvesting cocoa pods without protective clothing. “I don’t know what statement Mondelēz could release in the wake of that other than maybe ‘Honestly, did not think anyone would actually check,’” Oliver joked.