 So, I'm really excited to introduce Linda Veldhausen and Ken Giller. They are the manager and co-chair respectively of SDSN's network on sustainable agriculture and food systems. And today we have a really exciting program for you about the cocoa commodity chain. So I'm going to go ahead and invite Ken and Linda to connect and kick off your session. Brilliant. Well, thanks, Lauren, and thanks for the previous speakers. Very interesting to hear what you've got to say. So good afternoon, morning, evening, to all of you depending on where you're dialing in from and welcome to this webinar on a living income for cocoa farmers. My name is Ken Giller. I'm co-chair of the thematic network under SDSN on sustainable agriculture and food systems and I'm your host for this afternoon for the coming 90 minutes. So our network focuses specifically on SDG2, the zero hunger SDG, but obviously we have clear links to SDG1, the zero poverty when it comes to thinking about rural households and smallholder farmers in less developed countries. And today we've chosen them to focus on cocoa, which of course is the basis of chocolate and a luxury product enjoyed all around the world and that's our link with happiness on Earth Day. We'd like to find out where all of you are. So Linda is just going to set up a quick poll. You should see a pop-up menu where you can respond. So if you can click on the poll, you can then tell us where you are in the world. While you're doing that, I'll just continue with the introduction. So then cocoa, food of the gods brings happiness to many of us, but not necessarily to the farmers who are producing it. Many of them live in poverty or even below the poverty line, which means they can't earn sufficient income to meet the basic needs of their families. Now the chocolate industry actually has a deep historical link with addressing issues of poverty. Two famous chocolatiers from my own country, the UK, the Roundtree and the Cadbury families were famous industrial philanthropists who cared deeply for their workers. And Roundtree, Seabone Roundtree, the son of Joseph Roundtree, was the first actually to use a cost of basic needs approach to derive a poverty line for workers. Now it's less clear whether these companies ever considered the farmers and farm workers who produced the cocoa that was used to make chocolate in their factories, but it's interesting in my mind that they have this link with considering the well-being of workers in their supply chains. So today we're going to consider how cocoa farmers could achieve a living income. So that's an income that would enable them to send their children to school, have proper housing and health care, and to eat nutritious meals. So before we just go ahead, can we have the results of our poll, Linda, if it works? So we've got 11% from Africa, 60% from Europe, maybe not surprising, 9% from Asia and 19% from the Americas. So we've got quite a broad range of participation. So to introduce the session this afternoon with some background, we have Yucca Bartz and she's going to talk then about this living income for cocoa farmers and give more background explanation. Yucca is a senior researcher in sustainable value chain development and she works in a group working on agricultural environmental economics. So I'm going to hand over then to Yucca and I hope that we can put up the presentation for Yucca. Sorry, this is Lauren. I am working on the slides as we speak. They should be ready momentarily. So I'll go off and leave it to you, Yucca. Thank you very much again for this introduction. So we're waiting a second before the slides arrive. I'm hoping that people can see them now. The slides. I see the slide, the first agenda. Great. Just tell me next when you're ready. Thank you very much. So today we will discuss issues around the living income for cocoa farmers, why it is important and what we can do to support cocoa farmers, including the most vulnerable, to actually achieve a living income because many of them don't at the moment. Please, next. So the next slide is about chocolate production and cocoa production, which is required to actually create chocolate. As you can see in the left visual, the majority of chocolate is produced in Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa, followed by Ghana, with 2 million tons per year produced in Cote d'Ivoire. And the majority of the chocolate, which is produced based on the cocoa, is consumed in Europe, as you can see from the visual, in the dark brown dots. To your right, you will see the supply chain, which starts with smallholder producers generally, producing cocoa, which is a tree crop. The cocoa then is transported to a trader grinder, and all kinds of processes take place to process the beans into chocolate, which is retailed and ends up at consumer level. And there are an estimated 2 million farmers in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana producing cocoa. So that's a very important figure, because it's a huge number of farmers supplying us with chocolate. And one of the things we'll go into depth about today is that productivity per hectare is low on average, much lower than what is possible physically, which creates challenges for farmers to earn another income. Next, please. The living income concept can already explain about the concept that if you earn a living income, you earn enough to provide, to have decent housing, to have nutritious food, and to send your children to school. There has been a group of organizations working on the living income concept and defining it and creating ways to calculate a living income. And their definition is that it's the net annual income in a particular place, it's regional specific, to afford a decent standard of living for all members of the households. And elements of this decent standard of living are nutritious food, so it's not necessarily food in itself, but it's nutritious food, enough water, good quality housing, education, healthcare, transport, clothing, but also a margin for unforeseen and unexpected events. And to your left, you will see a visual explaining sort of the components of a living income. To the right of the figure, you see what kind of income sources a farm family household can have, which is based in this visual on cocoa and other farm products. But next to income from the farm, a family can also have off-farm income, which is depicted in the middle of the visual, as well as other income sources such as remittances. And to your left, you will see how the calculation is made between the actual household income in red, which is what farmers earn with all their income sources. They're the living income sort of level, which I will explain a bit about. And then there's often, unfortunately, an income gap. So a lot of the farmers do not earn enough to afford a decent standard of living. Next, please. So, well, how is this income calculated in practice? First, there's a living income benchmark is established, which is country specific, generally region specific, and sometimes also sector specific, where there is a benchmark figure for a living income calculated per reference family per month. So that's sort of the average family you come across in that area, which you can also recalculate to per household member per day. And then if you would like to calculate the income gap between the actual household income and the living income, you deduct the actual household income from the benchmark based on income from cash, from on-farm and off-farm sources, preferably taking into account the value of farm grown food consumed by the family. And you also calculate it per household member per day. And if you have these two figures, you know what the gap is, the living income gap is. And we'll dive into that in one of the next slides, what the really details are for cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Next please. So why was there a need for a living income concept? Quite some time ago, the World Bank Poverty Alliance thresholds were developed based on, well, quite a sort of rigorous methodology, which is now at this moment still $1.90 USD per person per day. And that's the 2011 figure for the poverty line. The only thing is that a lot of people realized that figure doesn't constitute a decent income. So it's basically a basic subsistence and survival which is possible based on this figure, but it's not a decent income. It's not something you would like to wish for people to have. So it's rather a very minimum than a good threshold. And a lot of organizations have been thinking about this and have been placing a strong emphasis on the idea of decency and human rights because we should allow people to have enough income to live comfortably. Next please. So here you can see quite a difficult graph maybe to see quickly what it entails, but we will get back to this several times. So I'll explain this shortly. So we have data from Cote d'Ivoire and from Ghana, and this is based on the dataset collected by Kitt Royal Tropical Institute. And we use their data to see what the income levels are of all the farmers in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, and how many farmers earn more or less than the living income benchmark and the World Bank Poverty Line benchmarks. And as you can see from the graph, there are three colors, orange is cocoa income, yellow is off-farm income, and blue is other on-farm income. So that could be other vegetables or animals. And we've actually ordered the households by income. So the lowest earning households are to the total left and the highest earning households are to the total right. And as you can see, there's a huge difference between what farmers earned and to give you information on the living income benchmark in Cote d'Ivoire, for instance, to the left, 82% earns less than living income and 42% earns less than a World Bank Poverty Line of $1.19, 2011. In Ghana, it's a bit less severe, but still quite a challenge because 73% earns less than a living income and 30% less than a World Bank Poverty Line. So this is, well, we were quite surprised, even though we knew it was a challenge, right, earning an income, but we were still quite shocked by these figures because this is information that's applicable to millions of farmers, cocoa farmers. So if you go to the next slide, please. And when we looked more into the data, and this is in another data set, why these farmers, so many farmers earn so low incomes, we found three root causes which are not very easy to address, which is generally small farms. So as you can see to the left, in Cote d'Ivoire, the farmers that earn, well, the least also have the lowest farm sizes in terms of hectares. In Ghana, it's a bit different. So that's an interesting thing. So in Ghana, there's not a lot of difference in farm size between the different groups of farmers. But as you can see to the right, the farmers who are poorest actually have the lowest yields per hectare. And as you can see in the picture, the green dots indicates the highest yields we found in our data, which can even be higher. So there's a huge yield gap, especially for the poorest farmers. The third root cause is that there are few alternatives in the rural areas. So farmers, except for some areas where for instance, mining is coming up, it's very difficult to find other sources of income or to increase your diversification and earn more with other sources of income in the areas where cocoa is produced. So it's not an easy and quick fix to address these things, which we will touch upon a bit later as well. Next please. Another thing which we'd like to mention and which we'll also discuss later in the discussions is that cocoa production by smallholder producers is a driver of deforestation. So there's definitely a connection of farmers trying to produce more cocoa and crouching in primary and secondary forests to produce more cocoa. So, and that's something that's also a huge issue at the moment in West Africa, but also in other cocoa producing countries, so how to address this deforestation and threats for biodiversity. And what we also have seen is that a lot of people think that if you improve farm productivity and income on the existing farms, that that would reduce pressure on the forest, but it actually that's not how it works unfortunately, because farmers continue to encroach into forests and plant cocoa and other crops. Next please. Next slide please. Yes. So what solutions can we envisage to increase the cocoa farmer incomes to reach the living income benchmark? And we can go to the next slide immediately to slide number 10. We have thought of several scenarios which we could run with our data sets. The first is the doubling of prices. Let's see where we are because the slides are moving fast. Please go to slide number 10 or 11. Yeah. So this is the baseline figure which we saw earlier with the information which you saw earlier. So we can move to slide number 12, which depicts what would happen if we would double the cocoa prices. There's a lot of discussion on whether if we increase the cocoa prices that will lead to all farmers earn a living income. Well, we've run an analysis where we double the cocoa prices in our data. And here you see that there is a difference. So more farmers are earning more than a living income. But what we see also is that the least benefits are for the poorest farmers because they produce very small volumes. So basically if you double the price, they do earn much more, which is every dollar counts. But still they won't be able to earn more than a living income. And next please, next slide. We did the same type of analysis to see what would happen if farmers would produce much more on average per hectare. So if the yields would be increased and we used the 1500 per hectare figure because that is supposed to be possible. And as you can see here, there's a huge impact on income levels of farmers if they would produce much, much more. But this is really a tough scenario because that would increase cocoa production in total also hugely. Yeah, the next slide summarizes the results of the scenarios. And here you can see that indeed yield increases would have much more effect on cocoa farmer incomes towards earning a living income than doubling the price. And for both the countries. So even there would be very few farmers left who earn less than the World Bank poverty line, for instance. Next please. The only thing is that such results would be very difficult to actually reach. Doubling the price is something which doesn't necessarily happen very easily because the money needs to come somewhere. So the question is whether consumers will be paying twice the price or where margins will be used to pay such a higher price. And for the improvement of yields per hectare, we need to take into account, well, the contextual and personal factors for farmers to actually change their behavior, invest in their farms and by doing so improve their cocoa productivity hugely. And as we've seen in the past decades, there has been a lot of investments in working with farmers to change their practices and increase the yields. And we've seen very few initiatives with large scale and large impacts on yields and income, unfortunately. So this is something that would need to be addressed in working with the farmers. And another aspect which is important here is if farmers would be producing much, much more because of all kinds of interventions, there would be a glut in the market because simply the supply of cocoa would be way bigger than the demand for chocolate. The final slide. The final slide touches upon some of the solutions towards increasing the incomes. Overall, it's important to zoom out, to look at the farmers and to see what farmers need, what types of support the most and how best to influence behavior change. And then you can see some sort of directions for working with farmers who have the potential for a living income, namely focus on cocoa farming improvements, deliver services also for on-farm diversification, but also make sure that the supply management is in place because otherwise we're getting too much cocoa. But there are also a lot of farmers with no potential for a living income from cocoa production and they really need a totally different type of support. Income diversification is important, food security improvements and other health aspects need to be addressed. And specifically, there needs to be solutions around land fragmentation and land reform so that some farmers can grow bigger and other farmers have the opportunity to work somewhere else. And for that collaboration is needed, which is the rest of the remainder of this session where we will be discussing about. Thank you very much. Great, well, thanks very much indeed, Yuka, for giving us that excellent introduction. Just to remind it to everybody, and I can see already there are some questions coming in, so please do type your questions in the chat that you'll see down at the right-hand corner of your screen and your control panel. But we're going to go on into a series of other short interventions and then we'll have a panel discussion later on where we'll pick up on many of your questions. So we've got a couple of short presentations coming up of two local perspectives but the first one is from Ursul, Ursul, in fact, Ursul Gong, Ursul Gong from Cameroon, and Ursul is actually conducting his PhD currently under this program, Coco Soils, which is very much focused on increasing productivity and his own work focuses on diversity of farmers and how they might actually be able to improve their soil fertility management to boost yield. So Ursul, over to you, in Cameroon. Yeah, thank you again for giving me the floor this afternoon and the opportunity to contribute to the thinking about how to find cocoa farmer and leaving income. But I think before we get there, it's important to understand why cocoa farmers are where they are now. And as we've seen in the presentation by Yuka, cocoa farmer trade, cocoa income, I try to present a high share of cocoa-based household total income. But this farmer trapped in a vicious cycle for two million reasons, but they lack opportunity to diversify their income portfolios sometimes because they are simply unaware of existing options or they lack resources to invest in other income generating activities or the environment is also sometimes unfavorable with options simply not existing. And secondly, the key issue as mentioned previously is linked to cocoa yield, which are low. So the cocoa yield is low and that coupled with the high input cost and the various marketing challenges that farmer face, such as low price or intermediary bias malpractices, contribute to lowering the cocoa income. Therefore, with the low income, these farmers simply don't have the means to implement good agricultural practices. And if you add to these issues of non-implementation of good practices, issues related to climate variation, who are on the planning side for a city or aging plantation, they can only end up with the low yields. And so the cycle we start, this is a simplification of the reality, but it gives you an idea of what is on the ground. So how can we achieve a living income for cocoa farmers? In my opinion, I think we need a one adjusted increase of yield and the price. So both the price has to increase and the yield too. And diversification of farmer income but for it's also important because if you look at the farmer, we can see that their profiles, their challenges as well as their interests are different and you have to act accordingly. So focusing only on increasing prices or yields will not be very effective in the long run, not benefit the national market. And Yuka mentioned some of the reason why because if you increase the price or only the yield, the market can be overwhelmed by cocoa and then the price will fall and then you get back to starting point. And if you increase only the price, you can allow the gap between poor and the rich or drives more environmental degradation as new farm are being created. But still we think increasing it is the key point we should have to act. And to do that, I think we have to continue to facilitate access to knowledge and new technology through provision of training, through farm at the school or by supporting the creation of rural research center which can even serve for the production and distribution of planting material. We can also develop some decision support tools to assist cocoa farmers and extension is in jelly activities. It's also important for us to facilitate access to input. We can think of community garden for planting material to encourage regeneration or increase access to credit by strengthening local credit cooperative or thinking about adapting the warehouse resistance that works for cereal in the cocoa sector. Because most farm actually set their product at a very low price because they have an urgent need of income. When we look at the diversification they are different way we can do it. We can actually facilitate or support some engagement in other incongruent activities such as non-tibal forest product exploitation. We have local processing of our cultural product or livestock wearing or retail trade just needs a few of them. And we can do all of that by providing training, credit or by linking farmer to profitable market. And another, I mean, as you guys said if you increase the yield or even if you double the price some farmer will still earn a decent income. So diversification will be their only exception which means really important to target the diversification because that helps a large number. And you also have to act on the marketing channel and to ensure that farmer receive a fairly revenue for cocoa. And for the purpose I think it's important for countries that produce cocoa to accentuate lobbying on cocoa trade for farmer to receive better price and also develop infrastructure to reduce transaction costs. And other things to do is really to fight in the major in my practices that really reduce the farmer's cocoa revenue. And I mean, to keep it in short I think we really need a strong joint private and public effort to overcome the challenges faced by farmer and also to have a holistic approach in addressing those challenges. I think that's what I had for us today. Thank you. So thanks very much, Ursula. And I mean, you're there on the ground working with cocoa farmers all the time in Cameroon, of course. Although currently I understand lockdown in your house for some weeks. I'd like to move now then to Faustina. Faustina Oben Adomar, if you can come online. Faustina, there we are. So Faustina is working on a project funded by the Dutch Science Foundation to improve cocoa production for small holders in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Over to you, Faustina. Faustina, you need to unmute your microphone. Thank you, Chris. I'm going for the microphone. It says that you are unmuted, but the audio we're getting is very garbled. I think maybe there's something wrong with your headset. Do we maybe want to try unplugging it? Can you pull it out of the computer? The test worked very well yesterday. Can we go now? Can we go now? We can definitely hear you. I think there's also a little bit of a time delay. So I'm going to say let's try, maybe just speaking a little bit more slowly. OK. OK, so can we just move to the next slide, please? Next slide. So basically what I have been looking at interventions from both private sector organizations and governments extension delivery for cocoa farmers. And a little bit of context, cocoa is Ghana and Ghana is cocoa. It's the slogan of one of the farmer's corporations that I work with. And these farmers certainly know the contribution that they make to the economy of this country. And the government also recognizes these contributions. And so for these farmers and the architects who are seen breaking forth in the picture, the common statement they always make is we are the ones that hold the economy. However, for these farmers, their incomes are low as you can and also have mentioned. And because of that, they rely largely on loans that also come with unfavorable payment conditions. So these farmers fall into a cycle of debt. And sometimes they have to give out their farms for some number of years to offset these loans or fall into some sort of poor debt labor. Now yield has come up, increasing yield and closing the yield gap has come out in all the presentations. That's important in delivering income for farmers and good agricultural practices such as pruning has the potential to do this and then increase farmer's net income. Yet adoption is really low and friction around these things is quite high. So what we did was to examine interventions around pruning and the challenges that I encountered. Next slide, please. So by next slide, please. Okay, so pruning has been tutored as a strategic back, please. Pruning has been tutored as a strategic practice within the cocoa sector because it has the potential to increase yield through light capture and maximizing nutrient use. And it also improves sunlight penetration and air penetration in the cocoa farm. So it reduces the incidence of pests and diseases. So with positive effects on yield increase, reduction in pre-harvest losses and reduction in spending on pesticides, it can automatically improve farmers' net income. So pruning has become an integral component of the PEP which is the Productivity Enhancements Program of Ghana Cocoa Board. And many private firms are also training young men and putting them groups to deliver pruning services directly to farmers, mostly without a charge. However, resistance is high, even for these pruning services that come free of charge. And what we found was an underlying challenge of misfits in terms of needs and priorities, in terms of the technical, cultural, and political dimensions of pruning. At the supply side, what we saw was that structural pruning involves cutting some of the main branches of cocoa to keep it through the right architecture that can really capture light and maximize the nutrient use. And so the effort in the supply side is to really normalize structural pruning as well as sanitation pruning. But for farmers, the emphasis is on sanitation pruning, which involves cutting the deceit branches and some rotten parts. So although, because actually there is a lot of efforts to make sure that farmers accept structural pruning so that they can enjoy the full benefits of pruning, because it involves cutting main branches, farmers think that this kind of practice is unanimous to reducing the poor bearing capacity of the tree. And because of that, they are quite active in some passive resistance around pruning interventions. So the narrative within the supply side, especially among extension offices and firms is that farmers do not want to prune or they lack the capacity to adopt the recommendations. However, farmers also think that extension workers do not consider specific farm conditions in relation to pruning and this has been the basis of their resistance around pruning. Next slide, please. So the key message that I want to come up with is the fact that yield gap is a big issue in the co-co-sector and improving knowledge on good agricultural practices is important for yield increase. But in the development of these technologies as well as the delivery approaches, there is a need to think beyond organizational fixes and protocols and start thinking about how do we move from best practice to best fit at all levels of these interventions and technologies. Then at the research side, I also think that there is a need to beef up the research on the technical knowledge on these good agricultural practices. And for pruning in particular, the underlying question that still remains unanswered is what type of pruning delivers what effects and at what time span. And then because the narratives within the supply side and the demand side are quite entrenched, it's also important that there is coordinated feedback mechanisms throughout these technology development interventions so that there will be actual effort at making sure that there is some level of faith in terms of priorities needs and needs. So that we can have them go to the surface, like would we have it over the university if I didn't come from Paris. So thank you, Ken. Thank you, Faustina. We really got going. The microphone was perfect later on. I mean, we had a few hiccups to start with. So great to have a couple of interventions there. One from Yaoundi from Whistle and one from Faustina from Accra. What we want to do now is to move on to a short panel discussion. And this is with two people from here in Wageningen. So Nick Koening, if you'd like to come online with your camera and Mike and Maya Slingeland. So Nick is a farm policy analyst who focuses on global security and economic development. And Maya works within the university with us at Wageningen leading research on crop nutrition and service delivery across West Africa. Over to you guys to discuss. Okay, thank you, Ken. Nick, thanks for joining our seminar and being available to share with us your expertise and making some comments on the findings of the former presenters. And if you don't mind, we'll kick off straight away. And my first question is from the presentations by Yuka and from the comment by Ursel. I tend to conclude that raising yields and providing alternatives for the smallest farmers is much more effective than raising prices. Do you agree or is investment in raising prices still worthwhile? I think Yuka's presentation made it very clear that yield increases and providing economic alternatives outside CoCo to the smallest farmers had much more direct effect on farmer household incomes than raising prices. The problem is that without stable CoCo prices and without more remunerative CoCo prices, there will be no broad layer of farmers with some potential that can invest in the kind of management strategies like those that Faustina just explained, which can lead to higher CoCo yields. So without better prices and without a lot of other things like extension and credit input supply, you won't have those yield increases. You will have no increase in farm productivity and without an increase in farm productivity, not just in CoCo, but in agriculture generally, but also in CoCo, agriculture cannot play its role as a starter engine of non-agricultural development, industrialization, and so on. And then there will be few economic alternatives that can be supplied to those smallest farmers. So the whole system will remain trapped in the kind of this year cycle that Ersel just sketched. And then the only thing you could realistically do if you refuse to improve the prices is to create a kind of enclave economy based on a small layer of the most well-to-do farmers. And there you can maybe by training programs, et cetera, you can create a kind of purely environmental sustainability relying on the governments to take, let's say, oppressive measures to kick the smallest farmers out of the sector. And then you'll get a kind of enclave economy that you see in certain places in Latin America. But it will be difficult. That's not what you want to do, I suppose. And it's certainly not what you can sell to your concerned consumers as a social responsible situation. Okay, I think that is quite clear. So prices are part of the game. But other people also say, and I know you have the same opinion, if you raise prices and you raise yields, then we have a sort of defeating effects because it will lead to overproduction. And then if you have overproduction, you will have lower prices again. So how can we avoid this negative feedback mechanism? Sure, well, let's first say this is a universal problem of agriculture worldwide. If left to themselves, agricultural markets are highly unstable and have a tendency to overproduction. Now, of course, the richer countries have coped with this situation traditionally by supporting crisis, sometimes by domestic supply controls. And in many cases, unfortunately, by dumping their services on other countries' markets in direct or indirect ways. Now, the problem in tropical export crops like cocoa or coffee or tea is that the domestic market for such products is very small, they are highly export dependent. So if you want to raise the price and if you want to control the production and you cannot do it just on one country basis, you have to have some international structure that leads to price stabilization at an acceptable level in that, before it's over-supply. Yeah, that's very interesting. When I remember, well, supply control was implemented some decades ago in the form of the international commodity agreements. And they seem to work well, but at a certain moment they disappeared. Can you highlight us a little bit on how they worked and why they disappeared? Well, what you say is true. Broadly speaking, between the 1930s and the 1980s, there have been several attempts at international control agreements to stabilize the prices of agricultural products on the world market and to control the supply. For tropical export crops, these agreements came late. In CoCo, the first agreement was only in 1972, due to the resistance of the consuming capital. In 1972, there was really an agreement with export quota for the export quotas for the producing countries and an international buffer stock. In the 70s, the buffer stock and the export quota provisions had not to be implemented because CoCo prices were quite high. They were high enough on the market. In the 1980s, there was a dramatic fall in the prices of tropical export crops. The coffee agreement still worked and succeeded in keeping the coffee prices above the free market price that would otherwise have been the price. But the CoCo agreement was a new CoCo agreement negotiated in 1980. And by the pressure of the consuming countries, that agreement only had a buffer stock and the export quotas were abolished. Now, when the prices collapsed, the buffer stock simply overflowed. The budget was exhausted and after a few months, the whole system collapsed. And after that experience, and that experience was used by the richer countries to kill the whole system of international commodity agreements. So, since the 1980s, we have no effective international control agreements for that kind of products. So, that's very interesting. And I remember that you, since a long time, already tried to put it back on the agenda. You gave a presentation in the Europa Conference in the near-main some 14 years ago and you also gave a presentation in Eco in Berlin some two years ago. And it seems to be a sort of proposition for supply control, but apparently you have some extra key points that people should take in account. So, can you highlight us on those key points that then may prevent perhaps or that such agreements will collapse or that may make them more efficient or more effective? Well, a few things. First, in cocoa, the situation is relatively easy compared to, for example, coffee. Because some 60% or more of the global production comes from two countries. That makes it already more easy to create a kind of OPEC or cocoa. One important thing is that there's two countries. It would be wise for them not to do it alone. And today, Ivory Coast and Ghana have introduced minimum price system that they try to raise the FOB prices that they get for their cocoa. But I think it's very important to include other producing countries in their control system. Because otherwise, after a few years, traders will try to deal with other countries. Other countries will use the situation to rapidly increase their production and then it will become self-defeating. So it's important to have a multilateral system. Another key issue, I think, is that the way in which you can control the supply in cocoa, in fact, it's easy. It's difficult because you have millions for farmers in countries with limited administrative capacities. But on the other hand, there are a few, it is very easy to combine cocoa supply management with forest conservation. And you can define no clearing zones where no further clearing of forests for cocoa plantations is allowed. You'll have a lot of degraded plantations and deceased plantations that can be uprooted. And you can stimulate farmers to introduce shaded systems, which are cocoa is a shade plant. So it's better to have shaded systems and not to have open sun systems, which give the good production for a few years, but then it's more easily exhausted. So you can use those measures to organize a supply control system. And so you can have a kind of green environmental conservation or back cocoa plant. And that was a central element of the example plan that we made for the West African Farmer Federation, Ropa, that we presented in the International Cocoa Conference in Berlin a few years ago. I think one key point that you perhaps wanted to mention but you didn't say is that, of course, the benefits should then come to the farmers and not to the countries. Because else your whole agricultural development that should be fueled by agriculture will not take place. That's vital. That's vital. It's very, very important that if you raise the international cocoa price, the benefits don't simply go to the cocoa boards and the governments, but that they actually raise the farm gate prices. So the whole plan that we proposed had a number of elements to guarantee that that would happen. That it would be an international secretariat. The benefits would be true to that secretariat. Part of them would be used for the mobilization campaign for farmers to organize the cocoa farmers who could negotiate with the governments about their share in the FOB price, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's quite clear. I think it's a very interesting story, Nick. And thank you very much to propose a co-pack. And for those that follow this seminar, the paper that Nick wrote related to this will be made available. Thank you and a hand over to Ken. Thank you very much, Nick. So thanks very much, Nick and Maya. And on the chat, Linda's already given a link where you can download the paper that Nick wrote. We thought it was important to bring up this topic immediately because of course, both of these issues of increasing price and increasing productivity as two options often then do lead very much to increases in production. And we need to think about ways of stabilizing that so we don't get this co-book effects. I'd like to invite now our panelists who could all open up the cameras and microphones because our aim now is we have a series of different people from different organizations, including the private sector. I think we only have space for six cameras, but anyway, I think we're six or seven people potentially. I'd like to kick off by asking the same question to each of these panelists. But just before I do that, I just remind everybody you can submit questions through the questions pane and we're accumulating some questions. So I want to try and find time to be able to feed some of those questions back to our panelists. But then maybe to start off with, so Gail and Jonas and Vava from IDH, from the Sustainable Trade Initiative. So the question to all of you is, well, what does this concept, living income concept mean to you and how do you engage with it through your own work? Gail, over to you. I'm having trouble hearing Gail. Lauren, can you hear me? Thank you, can you hear me now? Yeah, that's good. Thank you very much. And thanks to Yuka for setting the scene so well and also for Ursa and Postina to really give us a really good reality check. So just maybe to backtrack a little bit in terms of IDH, we are the Sustainable Trade Initiative. We work globally to drive sustainable business models in several agricultural sectors, right? Beyond cocoa included. And for us, sustainable trade is really about having thriving farmers with thriving businesses, right? So a big part of the work that we focus on is enabling smallholder farmers to reach a living income and specifically to closing the gaps that Yuka was mentioning in the very beginning that we're seeing in different sectors, again, in cocoa and coffee, et cetera. So in terms of what we've done in this space, a lot of the work that we've done in the past years has been focused on living wage, including in tea and Malawi, in the banana sector and the horticulture. I won't go too much into the details of each of those, but the experiences from that has really allowed us to set up a pretty robust roadmap on living wage, which we're now currently developing with on living income. And I think some of the most visible work that has come out of that is on coffee and the recent work we've done through the Task Force on Living Income and Coffee, where we've released a report just recently that looked at effective sourcing practices to help close the living income gap. In cocoa, what we've also seen is we've been working a lot to convene multi-stakeholder partners, for example, in the Belgium national platform on sustainable cocoa called Beyond Chocolate, where here we're seeing some ambitious living income commitments, including having cocoa growers that are supplying the Belgian market enabled with basic living income by 2030. So these are some of the things that we have been doing. Now, in terms of moving forward, I don't know if we can already speak to that, or is that in a separate part of the panel? Maybe let's go around and let's... I think my side of the issue will come back, then, Gail, yeah? So maybe Pierre and Laosie, Kamlinge from Olam, maybe you could explain to everybody what is Olam and how this is important for your work. I don't know which of you wants to kick off. Let's go ahead. I'll follow. Yeah. I don't know if you can hear me. Yeah, can you? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I'm Pierre Brune. I'm the head of plant science for cocoa and coffee at Olam International. And I will tell you a few words what Olam is about. Olam is a big international group that is headquartered in Singapore. And that is one of the main originators of many different communities. We are basically a supplier of fruit, feed, and fiber to about 20,000 customers around the world. And that includes cocoa, coffee. That also includes edible nuts, spices, edible oils, and a number of other products. In cocoa, we are a very large originator of cocoa, which means that we go and procure cocoa directly from origin countries. And we also actually do primary processing of the cocoa as well and sell ingredients from the cocoa, namely liquor, powder, and butter. And we are very engaged as a company in sustainability. And one of our stated goals is in particular to try to raise the living income for cocoa farmers. We have recently launched in 2019 what we call the cocoa compass, which is our 10-year goals, which have basically three elements to it, which is on the one hand focusing on farmers, which is about living income. We have the ambition of having 150,000 cocoa farmers achieving living income, who are directly involved in our supply chain. But we're also working at the community level. We like to help communities grow, eliminate child labor from our direct supply chain, also ensure that all children of cocoa farmers in our direct supply chain have access to education. And finally, we're also investing in the natural world by putting a lot of emphasis on protecting forests. There was a word about the issues around deforestation and cocoa. So we would like to invest in protecting forests and also in general trying to mitigate the environmental impact of cocoa. So leaving from quite an important thing for us, and maybe I'll let my colleague, Camerina, allow us to take over from this and give a little more detail. So maybe Camerina, specifically, there's a question coming in. Well, how easy is it to raise the yields of farmers in terms of their cocoa yields? And I know this is something you engage with very closely for your company. So maybe in your intervention, you can really speak to that question already, because how realistic is this to get a yield of one and a half tons per hectare compared to the 500 people are getting at the moment? Yes, thank you, Cam, for the question and for giving the opportunity to share what we are doing on the ground. And before moving to what we are doing, actually to improve productivity, we are working, if you listen to the different speakers before, they mentioned two levels that we can activate for the living income, farmers living income dimension, raising price, and then they yield the improving productivity as well. We are working on both, on the price aspect, we are engaging, we are engaged with the policymakers to get a discussion and contribute to that on the ground in different countries where we operate. And on the improving productivity, we are doing a lot on the ground with our farmers. We used to have these farm-of-field schools where we train all farmers together on programs, to on different good agricultural practices to improve the yield. But recently we realized that the farmers are not the same. All the farmers are not the same. We are farmers that as Luke has shown, that are well advanced that can implement easily some techniques and then others that you need to guide differently. That's why we have in place now programs such as coaching of farmers on their own farm. So the solutions are targeted to the farmers in his environment. This is how we are working to improve this productivity. And it goes from providing high-quality planting materials as we have done in the past years, is still continuing in some areas, some countries. Proper training. We've seen, as mentioned, the pruning element that contributed highly to improve yield. This is part of the things we are doing on the ground as well. And in each cooperative we have youth groups providing these trained youth groups that are providing this service to the farmers. So they are training on pruning. They are training on how to properly apply, crystallize a different element. And then they come as service provided to the farmers. And then we have in each of the cooperatives we are working in with our partners, we have a technician that is kind of training these youth groups on different techniques for them to implement. And all this put together with the tailor-made solution for the farmers can easily contribute to, can contribute to achieve the target. For now this is what I wanted to share with you. Yeah, you pick up very much on this slide here but Ursula raised earlier about this huge diversity of different farmers within the supply chains. And it's great to hear that you're engaging in that way right on the ground. And I think some of the numbers that you talk about are really phenomenal when you're working with, I mean, 150, 200,000 farmers in West Africa already in these activities. I'd like to bring on into the discussion now Verena. Verena Ingram from back in environmental research. Verena, same question for you. I'd like to pick up on two issues that Nick raised and also that Cameron also highlighted. So one is that we've got a market-based solution which is prices. We have technical technological solutions around yields and productivity. I think there's another element that we really need to take account of and that's how we're governing the whole value chain. And that means the combination of the two. So we've got not just the cocoa value chain from farmers to the manufacturers to the consumers but we've also got the governance of the land that cocoa is growing on. And they're two separate things. And I think if we want to avoid or at least try and control these trade-offs that we've heard about that Yuka talked about booms and busts and prices, deforestation, it really means that we can't just look at a technical fix or a market fix or some combination. As you talked about, probably there's some combination needed because both have their advantages and disadvantages. And I think the second point I'd like to make is about differentiation. So Cameron made a nice lead on to that. One farmer is very different from another even in the same community, even in the same cooperative, even selling to the same farmer. And when we're looking at living income, we're talking about not just cocoa income but other on-farm income and off-farm income. And I think there's also a role for not just the companies like Olam or organizations like IDH but also governments to see how do we look at a cocoa farming family as a whole and also at community level. So these different scales, I think are really important that we're not just looking only at farm level but we're looking wider community and national and market level. And then of course, now we've got a focus on the two big countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana and talking about co-pec, cocoa-o-pec kind of situations. Can we control markets? But we've got the much smaller and speciality markets as well that I think we also need to bear in the back of our minds. So if we want to have repercussions or positive repercussions about how we can influence income. Okay, great. Thanks for that. Nice to be short. Stephanie, Stephanie Daniels. Are you, there you are. Ah, Stephanie, welcome. You're dining in from the USA, I guess. So Stephanie, please could you answer the same question? Once you're involved with living income, why is it important? Sure, thank you Ken and to all the speakers. I am from the Sustainable Food Lab and we along with a number of organizations both on this webinar, as well as many others, founded a virtual community of practice on this topic of living income. The living income community of practice open to all and not cocoa-specific across sectors. And one of the things at the reason that a number of actors came together to found this, I think was the question of vision. What do we expect agriculture to be able to deliver to rural families? And the living income idea is very simple. If we think about it just from a personal point of view, whatever any of us does for work, we want to be able to have that work deliver a decent standard of living. So how would we measure that? If we recognize that the poverty line is not necessarily a measure of decency, do we want something else? And I just want to mention that I think what we need is a kind of better, more agile learning architecture as well as a more agile, fast-paced sort of action architecture. So some of the points that Fastina talked about about coordinated feedback mechanisms, this kind of thing about the need to segment farmers, the living income community of practice is trying to provide a space for people to exchange on evidence of what works for different kinds of farmers, what works not only for the main cash crop, in this case, COCO, but the other crops as well. And I think it's really needed for experts like the Wageningen team to be able to actively bring both the data you have as well as new research into the world where industry like Olam and others, the IDH programs are really putting that into action. I just want to mention finally that the community practice and there are several different European platforms of industry and civil society coming together, they all come together in an alliance for living income and COCO to try to do the alignment around concepts as well as the alignment around strategy mechanisms for how European governments are investing particularly in West Africa as well as how industries acting. And that is very critical. I think that is what I would call the sort of the action and strategy architecture. So I'm going to try and field some questions that have been coming in. I'd like to actually start with you Stephanie because maybe you can answer this, maybe not. Because there's a question really from Gab who says, well, how can people in the audience contribute? So if just consumers, from the consumer side, and there's another question, I can't actually find the name immediately of who was asking it. But what's the role of certification? Because I know that you work also together closely with some of the certification bodies. So consumer certification on that end of the consumption market, how can they help? How can they contribute? Not sure I have the answer, but I can just say some few thoughts. I think on the consumer end, probably for all of our food is interrogate our food. Do we know where it comes from? Do we want to have a little bit more information about the raw materials in our food? And if consumers can do that, that is a positive market signal to companies who are trying to add in those externalized costs like deforestation or low income. So I think what you buy, the brands you buy, all of that is critically important. That links to the role of certification of course, because the simplest way for a consumer, for any of us, is to look at a package and see a seal. Of course, there's a lot underneath that. And I think the research, some of which Vaganagan has led, is that certification alone is not the answer. It's a mechanism. It's very powerful to organize the supply chain. And the volunteer standards community under the IECL alliance, it's one of the founders of the living income community practice, just for this reason is how do we put together the mechanism of certification with the science driven approaches that the OLAM team was talking about a tailoring coaching to policy mechanisms. So I think certification is one tool and not the answer in any way. It is a very good communication mechanism that too. So there's, maybe this is a bit mean, but there's a question from Jürgen. What's the role of big companies like Nestle, which I guess are the ones making the most use of the crop? Are they giving anything back to the origin countries and small holders? And yeah, you used to work for Nestle. I know you don't anymore. But I'm representing the companies and I mean, I know you come at it from the research angle, but we do engage obviously in these communities with a whole range of different companies who seem to be pretty well aligned in terms of the goals. So maybe you could just speak to this what the role of the purchasing companies is as well as the trading companies like yours. Yeah. So I think it, of course, large consumer companies have an important role to play. And I would like to underline the fact that really, especially in the past, let's say, five to 10 years, the industry has really worked, been working very closely together in a way that is coordinated. There are bodies such as the World Coco Foundation that regroup a number of the key players in the sector that put together a number of principles and initiatives that all these companies are there to. So Nestle has been actually one of the first companies to really get heavily involved in the sustainability. And of course, now it's for Olam, also a very important partner and customer. And so, yeah, it's really about, I think, for the different companies to play their role. So Olam is very much, as you said, on the ground, we work with actually West Africa with 220,000 farmers. So we can really actually play a key role in implementing things together with, of course, other players and the government. The consumer companies play a very important role on the consumer facing side also, in terms of explaining to consumers, in terms of, of course, delivering the benefits. Well, the issues are. So that's quite important. So maybe, Gail, you could join in as well because you work with many different companies. So the question really, what are the companies giving back to the origin countries? Yeah. No, thanks very much. I'd like to just also maybe go a little step back and going to the question that you were just mentioning. I think there are two key points that are extremely important as we work with companies as companies really engage in living income. And I think the first one, and Stephanie alluded to this, is really to understand what are the actual income, incomes, former incomes in your supply chain? What are the gaps and what are the drivers towards those gaps? So if we already don't have that understanding within their supply chain, within the companies, it's hard to, you know, to see what's needed. Secondly, and this is again what IDH is really working with companies, traders, brands, retailers. So one is understanding what is the actual income, income gaps, but two, really identifying what are some of the high-impact models that we can really work with, right? And when we talk about high-impact models, we're really looking at, we've discussed all the different levers around productivity and yield or price and premiums, etc. But it's really looking at that integrated approach and understanding what is the smart mix of different interventions with different farmers who obviously need different interventions and services and so it's really understanding what is needed, what works. We, for example, work through our farm-fit initiative to really mobilize the types of different services, inputs, etc. that are needed within those different segments. I think an important lever within that whole living income formula that we are all working around is also diversification. And within diversification is really that access to markets and to off-takers. And we know that some of the suppliers, the companies on the ground, not only work with COCO but with also other products, so can be an off-takers of other products, but also can mobilize other facilitate market linkages. And also to capitalize on the work that we're doing in COCO cooperatives to benefit non-COCO productions. So that's a very important one. But as was mentioned also by you Pierre and Stephanie, I think, is really looking at the not just the sourcing side but the selling side and what value are we putting on the actual living income work? How is that being translated into our purpose brands? And that also links up to the question, I think, about consumers really making sure that that value is being captured at the consuming end side. And last but not least is really to look at what we are seeing identifying effective impact models is how do we mobilize the right level of large-scale investments? And here linked to our FarmFit initiative, IDH is also working through our FarmFit fund vehicle which really mobilizes different levels of investments in order to scale up. So for us that would really be the three main points that we would highlight with value chain actors. I think that's really useful and I think what's great, I mean, there's a great and there's a huge amount of goodwill obviously, there's a huge amount of commitment around the industry from all aspects. I want to come back to actions before we stop and we've got about maximum 10 minutes left. But there are a couple of other issues that have come up and I'd like to to get Gamina Laotian involved directly and then link this also to Verena. So one of the questions is about shouldn't we be focusing more on aspects of it's from Thomas on agroforestry system. So this whole idea of agroforestry but also diversification. And I know from discussions that we've had with you and with the air that your company is very interested in agroforestry and that as a specific role. Would you like to come in? Yes, Ken. Thanks. Agroforestry is key for us for our activities and especially in the region actually and we are really involved in promoting agroforestry bringing back shade trees and forest trees in the in the cocoa plantation or because you know what is happening and you around cocoa production and we are doing a lot on this like that's we have distributed more than one million shade trees across our cooperative to our farmers so that they can plant that and within this shade trees we have distributed also tree crop fruit trees which comes with the diversification also at the same time provide the shade trees back to to the plantation for ecological reasons but also for we are bringing back for for productivity as well because then you bring back the pollinators that will help on one hand increase to increase productivity also yeah yes exactly and then I mentioned while the trainings we are providing through the coatings but this does not apply only for cocoa of course these farmers are producing other other crops as Guy mentioned and then what they have learned on cocoa can be applied on the other trees if you have learned how to apply personalize it applies for all the crops these are elements that are bringing as well as what to contribute on the other crops food crops and other food trees as well sure because I think we need to understand that as well that these are not just cocoa farmers these are rural households with many different types of income and many different crops and this is an important part of it Verena I know you're also interested in agroforestry but also for you and for gamarin there's a question about cooperatives are cooperatives more able to provide technology and help assist with yields and independent farmers and are there barriers to cooperatives to obtain knowledge and technology to improve yields so I wonder if we could include some comments on that maybe Verena first and then maybe gamarin again yeah I think there's definitely cooperatives have a very strong role we've seen that through certification that they they're essential in channeling knowledge to farmers and also the other way round to to feedback information from the farmers up to especially the government I mean that's one of the actors that's been missing in this discussion that there is a very strong role for the government and maybe a role that they get both origin countries and consumer countries can play in transmitting knowledge and using cooperatives but they're not the only model and I think we have to be really careful and just focusing on single models and whether it's specialization or agroforestry or diversification it really has to be suited to the context and and so I think using not only cooperatives but also farmer field schools extension workers one-stop shops you know companies traders there's a whole mix that we've seen is possible and that mix seems to work the best that we've seen in certification so far you know I would love to keep discussing with you guys for the next hour or so but we've got about four or five minutes left max and I wanted to bring it on to action and I think it's really important to hear that comment from you Verena there about government because I think we've got governments in the producer countries we've also got governments in the if you like the donor countries in terms of development aid that we need to line up we've talked about the role of companies and I'd like to focus a little bit on one of them then the role of research and I know Verena you and Stephanie I think you've both been calling for something more coordinated in relation to data sharing and platforms would you like to comment on that and then maybe bring Stephanie back in yeah so I think what Stephanie mentioned about the alliance of living income is really important it's been very critical in getting you know defining what is living income for cocoa farmers and other farmers and I think building on that would be really useful so Gail said that for example we need to know what income our farmers earning and there's a lot of data out there both some with governments there's a lot with traders and with cooperatives but the moment that is not pulled together and we've seen the example from the cocoa soils program that is possible to data from many countries to have comparative data so some kind of like shared pre-competitive platform where we're able to look at you know what are farmers earning in terms of income on farm or farm how could how do interventions change that income I think is really important yeah Stephanie would you like to make a final comment Stephanie we're on a last round now yeah I'll just say very quickly I completely support that and I think the other place where a integrated sort of research and action architectures needed is around effectiveness of this smart mixture of strategies and that takes a sort of systems evaluation structure to look at the combined these different combined strategies that are working for different farm situations so I think the it's very critical to have those national level working groups that are both sort of industry hosted cooperative you know sort of action sites research as well as the global level so sort of the the this infrastructure of exchange that can go between these different levels is is really critical to support yeah so Camine you're you're probably the closest to the the farmers and there's a lot of these organizations but of course we depend very much on the producers are there some things your last thoughts you'd like to leave with us yeah what I would say is I would encourage all of us to work together as Stephanie said on on the pre-competitive element because we need we need each other some we have some piece of of the puzzle each so if we put it together we will save a lot of time for our farmers and for ourselves who faster on some topics so Gail I'd see Jonas your colleagues fell out of the call unfortunately but he was also very much emphasizing in discussions with me leading up to this that we really needed to raise this voice of of the farmer and the producer in the discussion do you have any final word for us yes sorry can you hear me now yes yes no absolutely sorry sorry the connection in the income room wasn't wasn't so well but no I think definitely in terms of having a better understanding of the the actual farm and not just the cocoa farmer but understanding really the situation of the household and the farm of that cocoa producer and I think also again going back to the cooperatives very important to when we're looking at you know providing services professionalizing really looking at cooperative but also understanding that different cooperatives have very different capacities right just like farmers so we're also looking at very very complex range of of entities there but just really the the two points I think that are really important for us is and and I concur with Verena and Stephanie really understanding coming to terms with the data what it's telling us and yes really analyzing what are the effective smart mixes that we should be promoting across the industry and across different players yeah any final words through your own research perspective of of where where should research be investing because this is I know your responsibility within your company yeah so I think that we've all understood that we're facing very complex systems and we have a number of issues that we need to drive or progress in parallel with a multitude of actors and many many small farmers and the really the the challenge is trying to integrate all of this so we talked about living income we talked about reforestation we talked about community issues and what we are trying to do at Holam and what we are also trying to do with respect to innovation and research is to look at it from a landscape perspective as well as you know how can we actually do things at the level of communities that are going to be both good for the farmer and also good for the environment and so that's I think that's the challenge so when we touch on reforestation it's not just planting trees for example but it's also looking at a broader perspective so now trying to be as inclusive as possible in the way we're building our research program well thanks very much Pierre so I think we've seen today that this issue of living income is an issue which really touches on all of us from the consumer the purchasing companies the confectionary companies the governments whether in Europe whether in Africa and the producer countries today we've had more than 300 people on the webinar which is great there are many more questions than we could address here and I've just been chatting with Linda on the chat here that will ask our some of our speakers to respond to those questions and we'll put that up on our on our website for the Sustainable Solutions Development Network I'd like to conclude then by thanking all of you for your active participation and thanking Linda and Maya Slingeland particularly for helping to organize the seminar the webinar I think it's been a really good discussion and on behalf of the thematic network in sustainable agriculture and food systems thanks for joining us today have a great rest of your day Earth Day and celebrate the role of chocolate in happiness so thanks to all