SUPPORTING STATEMENT: The assessment may include:? An assessment of the gap between current income and living income for cocoa farmers in Hershey’s supply chain;? The effectiveness of current company strategies to reduce this gap;? Recommendations for achieving living income goals, that include a gender equity approach. 
WHEREAS: Systemic poverty in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where 60% of cocoa is produced, is a driving force of child labor, deforestation, and other human rights abuses in the cocoa sector.1 Approximately 1.56 million children engage in hazardous work on cocoa farms in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.2 Low farmer income has also been linked to increased deforestation,3 with Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire losing 65% and 90% respectively of forest cover over the past thirty years.4 
Exploitative purchasing practices by Hershey and its peers keep local communities in poverty and are criticized as rooted in racial injustice.5 Cocoa farmers are often paid far below the World Bank’s poverty threshold of $2.15 per day.6 In response to low income, cocoa farmers have increasingly replaced cocoa with rubber trees or have sold their cocoa farms to gold mining operations.7 Without effectively addressing living income, the continued existence of the West African cocoa sector is at stake.
Living income8 is a human right that combats inequality and poverty.9 Raising the farmgate price,through premiums, for example, can significantly help cocoa farmers reach a living income.10Additionally, coupling higher farmgate prices with long-term purchasing contracts can providegreater security and resiliency to cocoa farmers.11
Although Hershey has a Living Wage & Income Position Statement, it makes no commitment toensuring cocoa farmers earn a living income. The position statement has been criticized forlacking a “concrete, timebound commitment and accompanying action plan...”12 Hershey’s vaguecommitment to promote a living income for cocoa farmers has resulted in a set of initiatives, suchas the Income Accelerator, that are largely ineffective at ensuring cocoa farmers receive a livingincome, and in some cases, are undermining it. For example, Hershey was accused ofundermining Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire’s recently implemented Living Income Differentials throughpurchasing practices aimed at circumventing it.13 
Notably absent from Hershey’s strategy is increasing farmgate prices; price interventions play a“key role in shifting value to farmers and enabling higher incomes.”14 Additionally, Hershey’sstrategy fails to apply a gender equity approach to address particular challenges women cocoafarmers face in cocoa-income-generating activities.15 
https://iasj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-Hershey-SH-Proposal.pdf

Filed by American Baptist Home Mission Societies