by
Vincent Dupont and
Diana Pietrzak
9th May 2025
In the weeks after Easter, as the brightly wrapped chocolate eggs disappear from shop displays, it’s easy to forget the stories behind them.
Beneath the seasonal indulgence lies an industry marked by deep inequalities.
Many consumers remain unaware that while this chocolate represents a billion-dollar industry, the people at the very foundation of its production remain trapped in cycles of poverty and exploitation. Cocoa farmers do the backbreaking labour of growing and harvesting the raw material that fuels the chocolate industry, but they have no power over the prices paid out to them. Those decisions are made by multinational corporations and financial markets based in the ‘Global North’ that see cocoa as just another commodity to be speculated on for maximum profit.
Conventional solutions offered by the sector seem to be widely accepted as the way forward. However, our research suggests that we might be collectively applauding a paradigm that in fact has very little to show, and is not bringing the change it so eloquently advocates.
Measuring poverty, missing exploitation?
In order to wash away chocolate’s bitter aftertaste, supermarkets offer ‘sustainability’ solutions for cacao farmers. Consumers are reassured by a variety of labels and certifications on packaging, promising us that large-scale sustainability initiatives are transforming the sector and improving cocoa farmers’ dire living conditions. These initiatives are often built on the gathering of immense amounts of data. Governments, corporations and civil society organisations insist that transparency, created through this extensive data gathering, is the surest way to eradicate poverty. In practice, this often means that a vast variety of actors, from consultants to auditors, are involved in the tracking of farmers’ earnings, the measurement of productivity, and the development of geolocation systems. But is all this gathering of data really benefiting those who need it most? Who is that label on our Easter eggs’ packaging actually helping, and how?
Within dominant sustainability frameworks, development is pictured as a technical issue, something that can be fixed through better metrics, more audits and corporate initiatives. In that way, measurement itself has become a new form of control. Farmers must document their earnings, comply with endless audits and prove their adherence to sustainability schemes – often at great financial costs borne by them. Their time and labour are spent producing data for corporations and NGOs to prove how ‘sustainable’ their production is. Underlying this fetishism of measuring and quantifying, there is a belief that if farmers professionalise their farms, they will become better, more rational entrepreneurs and eventually escape poverty. Yet, this data often fuels a sustainability narrative towards consumers around ad hoc topics such as child labour, health and safety or productivity gains for farmers. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the underlying structural inequalities.
Questioning a counterproductive paradigm
If measuring poverty does not solve it, then what does? Real change requires challenging the very foundations of the cocoa industry, and the global economic order at large. These are what we see as crucial steps towards real improvement:
- A redistribution of value – Cocoa farmers must receive a greater share of the wealth they create, instead of seeing profits concentrated in the hands of multinational corporations and financial speculators. This requires challenging the legitimacy of a handful of powerful corporations, and finding ways to break their stranglehold on the sector.
- Awareness of what we ask of whom – Current trends ask increasingly heavy efforts of those who are already struggling. When we burden farmers and farmers’ cooperatives with the collection of data needed for countless sustainability initiatives, we need to be aware of what it costs them. Certainly smaller farms and cooperatives risk being heavily impacted.
- Whose language are we speaking? – When corporations dictate what ‘ethical’ production looks like, they will never challenge the business model that brings them their profits. If sustainability is equated with an increased collection of data, intensified governance of supply chains, more productive farmers, professionalisation, rationalisation and an increase in scale, whose interests are we advancing?
Rethinking the Chocolate Industry
The cocoa industry operates as any sector in a globalised capitalist economy: cheap labour in cocoa-producing countries is used to generate massive profits for corporations in chocolate-consuming countries. Measurement and certification schemes do not disrupt this logic – they reinforce it.
What keeps this system in place is not just economic structures but the narratives that sustain them. All those repeating that things are gradually getting better through corporate responsibility and ethical consumption are slowing down more radical challenges to the system. It reassures consumers that their choices are making a difference while ensuring that the structures driving exploitation remain unchanged.
So, as we finish scoffing our Easter chocolate eggs, we should look beyond the ‘ethical’ labels or claims of ‘sustainable’ cocoa. We should ask why those who produce the world’s chocolate still live in poverty, while those who merely trade and market it reap billions. Real change will not come from better measurement. It will come from dismantling the structures that keep wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. And it starts with questioning the easy answers.
Diana Pietrzak and Vincent Dupont are researchers working for the Sustainable Development group at the HIVA Institute for Work and Society, KULeuven, Belgium.
Chasing promises of progress: control, consent and the proliferation of counting and accounting in a sustainable cocoa supply chain by Vincent Dupont and Diana Pietrzak from Work in the Global Economy, is available or read on Bristol University Press Digital.
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