Four ambitions for a sustainable cocoa sector by 2032

Climate change, deforestation, a living income for producers, and so on... in response to a range of challenges, the cocoa sector, on which between 40 and 50 million people worldwide depend for a living, needs to reinvent itself.

CIRAD has pinpointed four priorities for the sustainable development of the sector, to guide its research in partnership with the main producing countries:

1. Rehabilitate cocoa plantings by exploiting agrobiodiversity
2. Help to build markets that combine sustainable production with quality
3. Know, maintain and promote cocoa genetic diversity
4. Make cocoa producers more independent and build capacity.

To mark the International Symposium on Cocoa Research in Montpellier, CIRAD is sharing those four ambitions for sustainable cocoa growing, and invites stakeholders in the cocoa sector to contact cocoaresearch@cirad.fr to continue discussions of its vision.

At CIRAD, the cocoa sector involves:

• 60 scientists from ten research units, working in 12 fields, from genetics to anthropology
• four platforms in partnership for research and training (Agroforesta, Amazonie, Divecosys and Agroforesterie Cameroun) in around ten countries.

CIRAD is first in the global rankings for the number of publications in the field of cocoa agricultural science, and is involved in 12 national and international networks on cocoa, such as the French sustainable cocoa initiative (IFCD). It has some 50 projects on cocoa, such as Cocoa4Future, on agroforestry.

Read the roadmap (summary)