LICOP Partners with the Cocoa Sector for Living Income Benchmarks Globally
The global cocoa sector has joined with the Living Income Community of Practice (LICOP) and the Anker Research Institute (ARI) to ensure public access to credible and comparable data on the costs of living for farmers in 13 key cocoa origins. LICOP and ARI are partnering with the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa, GIZ, and cocoa industry leaders to deliver robust data collected by national experts with international global quality control from ARI, and broad stakeholder engagement by the government bodies and civil society of the countries.
A priority for this partnership is to conduct new research to update the original living income benchmarks done in 2018 in the world’s large cocoa origins, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. In December, the Ghana Cocoa Board and Swissco partnered with LICOP and ARI to host a workshop on a new living income benchmark to be calculated in Ghanaian cocoa growing regions. Also in December, GIZ support by the Conseil du Café et du Cacao hosted a workshop in Abidjan on living income to allow stakeholders to combine their efforts on this topic, and included a session on the equivalent benchmark study in the cocoa growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire.
These workshops enabled farmer representatives, civil society, government ministries and industry to provide feedback on their priorities and concerns on the research design. Among these included the need to understand how illegal gold mining and recent high cocoa prices have been affecting the costs of living; how to ensure that wide variability across these large countries is taken into account and how these studies can complement studies being done on costs of production and actual incomes of cocoa farmers. Validation workshops will be held in Q3 2026 in both countries.
By the end of 2026, the initiative will deliver updated living income benchmarks updated by inflation for 13 origins (available at the ARI website here); new benchmarks for Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and an updated benchmark for Ecuador by Q1 2027 latest when government data is due to be released. The initiative has been designed by LICOP and ARI to be a rolling, multi-year approach funded across the sector to ensure this data is calculated in a robust manner and made available to farmer organizations, governments and industry in a transparent manner. This data is one of the pillars of data in calculating and understanding gaps to a living income in different farming systems in order to develop more impactful initiatives to close those gaps.
