On 5 October 2020 the UK government closed its first round of consultation on a proposed law designed to prevent forests and other important natural areas from being illegally converted into agricultural land (FW 258). This...
13/10/2020
Highlights of the webinar:
The webinars in Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish (click on the links for the slides) were attended by over 100 participants, including civil society from producer countries, as well...
28/09/2020
The European Commission is exploring bilateral agreements with the governments of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to ensure sustainability in the cocoa sector, and in particular to tackle deforestation, farmer poverty and child labour.
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22/09/2020
The world’s forests, and the rights of many who depend on them, remained under assault in 2019.
These attacks came from many directions: from the erosion of environmental and human rights protections in Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro, to the Amazon fires; from the EU’s devastating bioenergy policy, to its raft of Free Trade Agreements with forested countries to increase our insatiable consumption of products that drive deforestation; from a lack of secure tenure rights for people depending on forests for their survival, to failures of transparency and accountability in the forest sector…
23/06/2020
European countries are the world’s largest importers of the cocoa beans whose production is devastating rainforests in West Africa and driving millions of children into child labour. To prevent this, chocolate companies and NGOs...
05/05/2020
Companies will back producer countries’ bold move to raise cocoa prices, and are also showing support for EU regulation.
13/11/2019
Europeans consume more chocolate than anyone else in the world. But the cocoa production sector – based primarily in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire - is plagued with child labour and deforestation.
Following decades of failed...
12/06/2019
Belgium has called for “an ambitious [EU] action plan against deforestation and forest degradation before the end of the current mandate of the European Commission”, as part of a new Belgian initiative on cocoa launched on 5...
18/12/2018
Cocoa is crucial to Ghana’s economy, but is also a significant driver of deforestation. The Ghana National REDD+ Strategy identifies agricultural expansion to be responsible for at least 50 per cent of deforestation, with cocoa a...
10/07/2018
Cocoa consumption is a major cause of deforestation – estimated to have destroyed an area of forest the size of Belgium between 1988 and 2008.
Other problems include endemic use of child labour, local tenure conflicts, and...
14/02/2018
