In 2009, Mars Pledged Sustainable Chocolate By 2020 To Cut Deforestation In Africa. It Didn't Work.
Mars Inc., maker of M&’s, Milky Way and other stalwarts of the nation’s Halloween candy bag, vowed in 2009 to switch entirely to sustainable cocoa to combat deforestation, a major contributor to climate change. But as the United States stocks up for trick-or-treating, Mars and other global chocolate makers are far from meeting that ambitious goal. Over the past decade, deforestation has accelerated in West Africa, the source of two-thirds of the world’s cocoa. By one estimate, the loss of tropical rainforests last year sped up more in Ghana and Ivory Coast than anywhere else in the world.
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Recent wildfires have focused attention on the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, but West Africa is another major trouble spot. Ivory Coast has lost 80 percent of its forests over the past 50 years. And in Ghana, trees have been chopped down across an area the size of New Jersey, according to an estimate by the minister of lands and natural resources. Although illegal mining accounts for some of the destruction, much of it is the work of hundreds of thousands of poor cocoa farmers seeking to expand their plots by felling mature trees, often in national parks and protected forests.
Left to rot, those trees no longer capture and store carbon dioxide but instead release it into the atmosphere. According to the Woods Hole Research Center, tropical deforestation is currently responsible for about 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The failure to make progress against deforestation has tarnished the image and credibility of the chocolate industry at a time when it is already under fire for its practices in West Africa. The Washington Post reported in June about the use of child labor in West African cocoa fields, which has persisted despite promises decades ago to stop it.
Last year, Mars postponed its target date for switching entirely to sustainably produced cocoa from 2020 to 2025. “Zero deforestation cocoa only exists where all the forest has already disappeared,” wrote Francois Ruf, an economist with CIRAD, a French agricultural research and international cooperation organization.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/mars-chocolate-deforestation-climate-change-west-africa/
