Sustainability monitoring systems used in cocoa supply chains can be vulnerable to inaccurate reporting, a new study by ETH Zurich and the University of Cambridge has suggested.
The study, which was published in the Science journal, looked at monitoring data from 407 cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire, which participated in a tree-planting programme operated by an international cocoa buyer and exporter.
About the study
As part of the programme, smallholder farmers were invited to plant shade trees to ensure the long-term health of cocoa trees and to increase biodiversity. The farms were then audited, with farmers potentially earning rewards for providing accurate information about how many trees they had.
As the researchers found, as many as one in four entries collected through the programme’s sustainability monitoring system had been manipulated, with changes ‘substantially higher’ when auditors and farmers were aware of the target value required for certification or a reward.
“In cases where the criteria (i.e. the initial farmer tree count) was met on the first attempt, retroactive changes were made in only 6% to 7% of instances,” commented Federico Cammelli, an independent researcher affiliated with the University of Cambridge Conservation and Development Lab. “It was quite different where the criteria was not met on the first attempt – in 33% of farmers’ cases, we observed subsequent changes.”
The researchers also tested whether withholding the target criteria from auditors could reduce manipulation. As they found, the rate of manipulated data fell from 25% to 11% when these criteria were withheld, indicating that if auditors are unaware of the criteria required to receive a premium under a sustainability programme or certification scheme, the incidence of misleading information can be ‘significantly reduced’.
EU Deforestation Regulation
“The study comes at just the right time,” commented Rachael Garrett, co-author of the study. “Under the EU Deforestation Regulation, trading companies must ensure that their monitoring systems function effectively throughout the entire supply chain.”
The EUDR requires companies placing products including cocoa, coffee, palm oil, beef, rubber, timber and soya on the EU market to demonstrate that they were not produced on land deforested after 2020. It will come into force from the end of December 2026 for large- and medium-sized enterprises, and from the end of June 2027 for small enterprises.
“There are conflicts of interest throughout the entire value chain, and there is a lack of incentives to ensure that the data collected on cocoa farms is independently verified,” Cammelli added. Read more here.
