Will Tracking Cocoa Beans Help Save The Rainforest?

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Daily News, Business News, News

4.2 • 5.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

The world’s rainforests have shrunk dramatically in recent decades due to the expansion of land for growing cash crops, like cocoa. The European Union is trying to limit destruction with a new law which aims to track where cocoa is grown. Farmers who want to sell to Europe— the world’s largest cocoa market— are racing to meet the law's requirements, or lose out. WSJ’s Alexandra Wexler details how the law will impact millions of cocoa farmers in West Africa. Further Reading: - Chocolate Prices Have Soared. A New Law Threatens to Keep Them High. - Your Sweet Tooth Is Getting Expensive Further Listening: - How Indonesia Tamed Rainforest Destruction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you have a favorite kind of chocolate? You're like a Hershey Kiss person or like a dark chocolate bar?
0:10.0	Yeah, no, definitely not a Hershey Kiss fan.
0:13.2	Dude, wait, hold on a second, sorry, I don't want to start with, you're not a Hershey Kiss fan?
0:17.6	I am not a Hershey Kiss or Hershey Bar fan.
0:26.7	I love chocolate, but I don't know as much about it as our colleague Alexander Wexler. She's written a lot about chocolate over the years.
0:31.0	What is not to like about Hershey kisses? So they actually
0:35.4	use relatively little cocoa in Hershey's chocolate compared to other types of
0:42.1	maybe more artisanal and not even artisanal like those sort of like 70%
0:46.9	cocoa bars you can find in like a grocery store in the US uses a lot more actual cocoa.
0:54.0	Chocolate is delicious, but growing cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate can have a
1:00.3	damaging impact on the planet. Most of the world's cocoa beans come from West Africa.
1:05.0	And over the last several decades, millions of acres of rainforests have been cut down to make room for cocoa farms.
1:20.9	Now, a new law requires cocoa growers to map their farms to prove their cocoa wasn't grown on deforested land.
1:25.0	How big of an undertaking is this to map all the cocoa farms in the world, actually?
1:32.0	It's pretty massive.
1:33.0	It's definitely millions, at least even in just West Africa, of small farms.
1:38.0	Wow, millions of farms that have to be mapped?
1:41.0	Millions of farms that have to be mapped. and they're not all in the same place and a lot of them are hard to get to.
1:47.6	A lot of them are kind of only accessible by foot.
1:55.0	Welcome to the Journal, Our show about money, business and power.
1:58.0	I'm Ryan Knutzen.
2:00.0	It's Friday, August 9th.
	...

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