Barry Callebaut, one of the world's leading manufacturer of high-quality cocoa and chocolate products, unveiled the Cocoa Horizons Truck, an addition to its Cocoa Horizons sustainability initiative.
It is a multi-purpose mobile unit powered by solar energy, which provides space for farmer training sessions in good agricultural practices, basic health care services, literacy training and child labour sensitisation programmes.
The Cocoa Horizons Truck, which was built in Belgium, will be shipped to Côte d'Ivoire. It will travel through the cocoa-growing regions of the African nation in July 2013.
It is a pilot project and part of Barry Callebaut's plan to significantly step up the impact of its Quality Partner Programme (QPP), a cocoa farming programme which is an integral part of the company's ten-year Cocoa Horizons sustainability initiative.
Farmer training
The team on board the truck will include Barry Callebaut's own farmer training experts. Depending on the needs of the respective community, a nurse and a teacher will also be on board to provide basic health care, such as vaccination programmes and educational services.
The truck will start its journey in San Pedro, a major cocoa-growing area in the west of Côte d'Ivoire, and gradually move east. It will visit every village three to four times a year, staying for about a week at a time. Assessing the needs of each community and adapting the truck's training program where necessary will be a part of the pilot programme.
Hervé Beerens, responsible for the Cocoa Horizons Truck project, said, "As many cocoa farmers cannot read, training will take place in the form of theatre sketches, with the truck serving as a stage. This kind of entertaining training format is very effective and will help close the knowledge gaps farmers have in good agricultural practices."
Activities
"As part of our Cocoa Horizons activities, we already have more than 50 Barry Callebaut employees on the ground in Côte d'Ivoire who are directly working with more than 30,000 farmers," said Nicholas Camu, group manager, Cocoa Horizons, Barry Callebaut.
"However, we need to scale up our activities in order to accelerate our drive towards a more sustainable cocoa sector. We are convinced that a multi-purpose mobile unit such as the Cocoa Horizons Truck is the ideal way of providing support to thousands of additional of cocoa farmers,” he said.
Camu added, “At the end of the one-year pilot phase we will evaluate the impact of the Cocoa Horizons Truck. If everything works according to plan, we intend to increase the number of trucks successively. We expect to reach up to 10,000 cocoa farmers across Côte d'Ivoire in the first year."
