Towards Forest Positive Cocoa

From the authors: “In our research, we focused on the impact of surveillance of cocoa production. Nestlé, like many multinational food corporations, deploys these methods in the Ivory Coast in such a way that a connection can be drawn between forest protection and militarization. Through the Ivory Coast government’s implementation of the forest protection program ‘Code forestier ivoirien,’ the urgent need to protect nature legitimizes human rights violations, such as the extortion and eviction of farmers who have lived all their lives in areas which were later declared protected. This kind of environmental preservation criminalizes these farmers and deprives them of rights.”

“How can the activist archive raise awareness amongs consumers in the Global North about the impacts of  cacao production in the Ivory Coast? How can such activism be democratized in an effort to protect the forest and to include cacao farmers in the discussions about the future of cacao production?” - JN. H.

“Reports act as authoritative documents while – through their format - produce certain discourse ecologies. The information is presented as finished complete. Our project questioned the extent to which the complexity of actors and issues involved in forest degradation can be represented.” - M.Y. 

“The dominant narrative, mobilized by Nestlé and other corporate stakeholders, tends to blame farmers for deforestation. The archive, a collection of seemingly neutral documents presented without comment, is often a technique of imposition: it is monological rather than dialogical. In our project, we aimed to produce a dialogue with Nestlé’s 2022 “Towards forest positive cocoa” annual report. This dialogue showed how many other narratives can be added to even a single page of information, and to what level of detail the given information can be questioned. The idea was to work with the concept of the palimpsest, an ancient document from which the original text has been scraped and reinscribed many times. This allowed us to question the limits of existing narratives about cacao production.”