How Barry Callebaut Supports Farmers

A large proportion of cocoa farmers earn an income below the extreme poverty line. Low yields on small plots of land keep cocoa farmers in a state of poverty, and as a result many cocoa farmers lack both the means to invest in improvements to their farms and the means to send their children to school and to hire professional farmhands. 

Barry Callebaut’s philosophy is to provide the needed support to empower cocoa farmers to leverage their cocoa farming expertise, to improve their yields and increase their financial resilience by diversifying their income. 

The Approach

A typical farmer that has reached a living income has on average 5 hectares of land dedicated to cocoa with a yield of more than 600 kg/ha. This is a different reality for the average cocoa farmer, who cultivate 3.8 hectares of land dedicated to cocoa with an average yield of 450 kg/ha. Even if cocoa prices increase, not all cocoa farmers will earn an income above the living income benchmark. 

Lifting farmers out of poverty and getting them on a trajectory towards a living income requires deep insights into the components of their income. Barry Callebaut have conducted in-depth research into cocoa farmer incomes in three major cocoa-producing companies (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana) with the intention of supporting the development and implementation of interventions. 

Their living income approach is structured around these interventions, leading to a smart mix for the cocoa farmers they work with: 

  • Interventions to increase cocoa yield by providing access to Farm Services, a combination of fertilisers, crop protection inputs, coaching, as well as soil analysis to drive tailored farm-specific interventions.
  • Interventions to create income from other sources than cocoa. This can include creating professional labour groups that provide farmers with professional pruning of cocoa trees and pest and disease management. Many of the labour group members are farmers.
  • Interventions can also entail Payments for Environmental Services. Barry Callebaut is implementing robust agroforestry systems, which aim to manage shade for long-term resilience. Through this program, Barry Callebaut distributes non-cocoa trees to help diversify farmer incomes, provide shade for cocoa trees for climate resilience, generate carbon removals, and improve soil quality and biodiversity.
  • Transfer of cash, which can take the form of cash premiums on top of the cocoa price, conditional cash transfers, including the implementation of good agricultural practices, and unconditional cash transfers.
  • Supporting cocoa farming communities in setting up of Village Savings Loans Associations, collective savings and loans schemes managed mainly by the women in the community that increase the financial resilience of cocoa communities in general and women farmers in particular.  
  • Supporting efforts towards land size consolidation to increase the size of farms. 

Measured Impact

Barry Callebaut is aiming for a consistent poverty reduction perspective, and a living income-enabling farming model. The first step towards this is to support the lifting of cocoa farmers out of poverty, measured against the International Poverty Line threshold.  

Their goal is to lift 500,000 cocoa farmers in their supply chain out of poverty by 2025, and to mobilise key stakeholders around a transformative cocoa farming model generating living income by 2030. 

Find out more about Callebaut’s work to improve the lives of cocoa farmers and their communities at Callebaut.com.