Giving Compass' Take:

• The New Food Economy explores the economics of chocolate, and how the demand for more cocoa in consumer products could help smallholder farmers in Africa and other nations make more money.

• What are nonprofits and businesses doing to ensure Fair Trade practices are enacted? Beyond our consumption, how can we help farmers in nations that export cocoa earn a living wage?

• Here's why sustainable chocolate tastes extra sweet.

Chocolate is, at once, close to our hearts and a crop grown in distant places by people many of us will never meet, harvested from fruits most of us wouldn’t recognize in nature ...

There is no way farmers can get out of poverty if they aren’t paid a reasonable price for their cocoa at the farm level and given the support they need to achieve a sustained living income. This starts with changes in how farmers are compensated (they currently receive between 3 and 6 percent of the retail price of chocolate bar).

It is also important for the world to reassess how farmers are perceived, says Frimpong Kwaku, Ghana’s coordinator for the Farmgate Cocoa Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to professionalizing cocoa for small-scale farmers. He said at the World Cocoa Conference, convened by the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) in late April, that “farmers must be seen as equal partners, not only as the group needing the most assistance, but as decision-makers, as important as all the others who make chocolate possible.”

And here’s where chocolate lovers come in, says Laurent Pipitone, former head of economics at the ICCO. We can best support cocoa farmers in our purchases, he says, by eating more dark chocolate.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires that a bar contain at least 10 percent cocoa mass to be called chocolate, but percentages can go much higher. “The darker the chocolate is,” Pipitone says, “the higher the cocoa content — and that has a beneficial impact on supply and demand factors.” In other words, if consumers demand products with more cocoa, more of the crop could be sold and more money could, potentially, go back to a farmer or farming cooperative.

Read the full article on how to help cocoa farmers across the world by Simran Sethi at The New Food Economy.