IDH initiated the Farm and Cooperative Investment Programme (FCIP) with the government of Cote d’Ivoire (Le Conseil du Café Cacao) in 2017 to improve cooperative investment and farmer prosperity. As part of this program, 11 companies and financial institutions have facilitated access to finance and professionalization services to approximately 400 cooperatives and 190,000 farmers.
Understanding the impact of these interventions at the farm level requires understanding better the farmers we work with. An important way to achieve this is to gather daily data on farmers’ economics and activities. We are proud to have been able to bring three FCIP company partners together – Cargill, Barry Callebaut, and ETGBeyond Beans – into a precompetitive collaboration to gather, feedback to farmers and cooperatives and publicly share aggregated farmer data from across various cooperatives using the Farmer Field Books (FFB) tool developed by Agri-Logic.
The analysis from this report provides valuable insight on the impact of interventions aimed at professionalizing farmers and cooperatives including through access to financial and training services. It also provides a critical reality check on the complexities involved in enabling farmers to reach a living income. It sheds light on the assumptions we make on the use of investments and how these investments lead to farmer profitability or not. We owe it to cocoa farmers and cooperatives to use these insights to design future interventions and promote business practices that have a direct impact on farmer profitability and household incomes.