The 2018 Cocoa Barometer said poverty, child labour and deforestation had been made worse by a rapid fall in prices for cocoa, particularly for growers in West Africa.
“Widely touted efforts in the cocoa industry to improve the lives of farmers, communities and the environment made in the past decade are having little impact,” said the report.
It described the scope of proposed solutions as “modest” and said these solutions did not even come close to addressing the scale of the problem.
The barometer, a biennial review of the state of sustainability in the cocoa sector, said smallholder cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire — the world’s biggest cocoa producer, have seen their income from cocoa decline by as much as 36 percent over one year.
