There is no chocolate without cocoa but being a cocoa farmer isn’t as sweet as it sounds. Although millions of chocolate bars are sold every day, cocoa farmers are some of the poorest people in the world and on average earn less than £1 per day.
There are over 5.5 million cocoa farmers worldwide but most are not in a strong position to demand a higher price for their cocoa and life is unpredictable for those who sell their cocoa to non-Fairtrade companies.
Farmers don’t know how much they are going to get paid because the price for cocoa goes up and down each harvest, and the money they receive often falls below what it costs the farmer to grow the cocoa. Find out more about the difference Fairtrade makes to cocoa farmers here.
CHEATED - The average farming family finds it really hard to pay for the essentials. To make things worse, cocoa farmers have sometimes been cheated when they sell their cocoa to non-Fairtrade buyers, who fix the weighing scales to show a lower reading than the actual weight of their cocoa beans.
