A chocolate company part-owned by a Ghanaian cocoa farmers' cooperative is offering treats that it says are guilt-free -- calories notwithstanding.
Divine Chocolate, a British company that has been operating since 1997, recently set up a sister company in Washington with the aim of bringing "fair-trade chocolate" to the mainstream US consumer. The company pays farmers a guaranteed minimum price for their cocoa beans in an effort to protect them from market fluctuations and help lift them out of the poverty that plagues Africa's cocoa-producing regions.
Divine Chocolate is made with chocolate produced by the members of Kuapa Kokoo, a co-op created following the 1993 liberalization of Ghana's cocoa market that now includes some 20,000 small-scale farmers. The co-op created the Day Chocolate Co, later renamed Divine Chocolate Ltd, in partnership with natural cosmetics retailer Body Shop International PLC and British charities.
PHOTO: AP
The US company opened for business in October. The British Divine and Kuapa Kokoo each have a 26 percent stake in it, giving the farmers a total interest of 33 percent. Other investors include Oikocredit, a Dutch organization that provides loans in developing countries, and the Baltimore-based charity Lutheran World Relief.
Divine's chocolate is made in a small German factory from cocoa beans produced by Kuapa Kokoo farmers. Farmers are paid a minimum of US$1,600 per 0.91 tonnes -- or the world price when that happens to be greater -- plus an additional "social premium" of almost US$150 per tonne. The market price for cocoa beans is currently about US$1,400, but it has been as low as US$700 and as high as US$2,000 since Divine's formation, said Sophi Tranchell, managing director of the British Divine.
The social premium is paid into a separate account and used by villages to pay for things such as clean water wells, schools, mobile medical clinics and grinding mills to produce palm seed oil.
Comfort Kumeah, the co-op's national secretary, said that before the co-op, farmers like her were often cheated by cocoa buyers.
"With the establishment of Kuapa Kokoo, it's our own organization -- we control it," she said in an interview during a visit to Washington this week that is part of Divine's publicity campaign.
Kumeah, 58, owns a two-hectare farm in Ghana's Ashanti region that she uses to supplement her salary as a kindergarten teacher -- a job that involves supervising 128 four and five-year-olds with just one other teacher.
The higher income Kumeah has earned from fair trade cocoa sales has enabled her to send her own five children to secondary school, she said.
Divine Chocolate in Britain had revenue of about ?9 million (US$17.6 million) last year, up from ?7.7 million in 2005, and expects to return its first dividend to the farmers, Tranchell said.
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