By the end of 2020, Mars said that it was able to trace about 43 percent of its cocoa to specific farms. But those suppliers buy their cocoa, too, and at the beginning of the chain are the growers, some of whom are small farmers in Ivory Coast, Ghana and elsewhere. Mars, for example, is one of the world’s largest users of cocoa, which it buys from suppliers like Cargill. Looking back, Adams said, that was a naïve approach to a complex problem.įor one thing, companies have to figure out exactly where their commodities come from. Many companies that committed to achieving “net zero” deforestation at first assumed the goal could be accomplished by buying from certified sustainable sellers, said Justin Adams, director of the Tropical Forest Alliance, an organization that helps companies meet their commitments. Do companies know what’s in their supply chains? And annual deforestation in the tropics, where trees store the most carbon and harbor the most biodiversity, has lately been on the rise. Many others did not even try, said Didier Bergeret, sustainability director for the Consumer Goods Forum, an industry group of more than 400 retailers and manufacturers that organized the pledge. No company, however, could say it had eliminated forest destruction from its supply chain. The 2020 deadline arrived, and some companies reported advances toward their goal. Some, like Nestle and Carrefour, went even further, saying they would eliminate deforestation from their supply chains altogether. Ten years ago, some of the world’s largest companies, including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Walmart and Mars, pledged to change their practices to help end deforestation by 2020.
When a shopper in New York, say, plucks a Milky Way bar from a grocery store shelf, that shopper becomes the final link in a long chain that might have started on a patch of land in Ghana, where a tropical forest recently stood.Ībout 80 percent of the trees razed each year in the tropics are cleared to make space for growing cocoa, soybeans, palm oil and cattle that are the raw materials for chocolate, cereal, leather seats and thousands of other products.
Hindsight is a series from the Headway team looking back at predictions and promises from the past.