Founded in the village of Anno in the sub-prefecture of Agboville in Côte d’Ivoire, SCINPA (la Société coopérative ivoirienne du négoce des produits agricoles) has launched a host of initiatives for its 4,000 members. We took advantage of the presence of its chairman, Moussa Sawadogo, at the World Cocoa Conference to find out how TDC’s marketing support has been beneficial and, above all, to take stock of its current projects.
What contribution has the TDC made? How has it help SCINPA develop?
The TDC has also taught us how to communicate and negotiate with buyers. We have professionalised the way we present our cooperative and explain our work. We are now convinced that communication is very important, as is packaging, when it comes to marketing our products. We are the only cooperative in Côte d’Ivoire to have presented our products at the World Cocoa Conference.
Could you tell us about SCINPA’s many projects?
We are developing agroforestry for our members. Many organisations distribute trees, but there is a lot of mortality. The farmer goes to a distribution centre, picks up the seedling and puts it on the back of his bicycle. By the time he gets to the bush, a lot has already been lost. And he doesn’t necessarily know how to look after the seedlings. There’s a lot of mortality. Allow me a little metaphor: when you bring a child into the world and bring it up, you can’t help but love it. But when someone else raises your child for you, you’re going to love each other, but it’s going to be a bit difficult. Proportionately, it’s a bit similar for trees. Nurseries need to be organised by cooperatives and growers need to look after them.
What have you achieved and what are your ambitions in terms of processing cocoa beans?
We already produce chocolate bars for the local market. And we make our bars ourselves, in the traditional way, without any processing. We use small machines that we make ourselves. We were first coached by Axel Emmanuel, then by another chocolatier who was himself trained in Switzerland. We now have ten women working in our workshops.
People love our bars. We produce milk and dark chocolate, but we didn’t stop there. We saw that people in the north of the country were producing soumbara, which is used to treat blood pressure. So we did some tests to see if chocolate and soumbara could go together, which turned out to be the case.
We also sell bars of sesame chocolate, which was a big hit last year at the Paris Agricultural Show, as was our cashew chocolate this year. We promote soumbara, and other products that we consume in Africa, through our chocolate bars.
Our other project is to turn cocoa beans into semi-finished products so that we can sell and export cocoa mass and powder in large quantities and export them. We’ve just been approved for export.
Mapping plots and school allowances
We also map our members’ plots to see if the planters are not in the classified forest and to find out the actual size of their plot. We also take the opportunity to carry out a small survey to find out whether they have children, how many of them go to school and how many don’t, for what reasons, and what their needs are. We also tried to identify the poorest, most deprived children, who sometimes don’t have khakis (uniform) to wear to school or whose khakis are torn. Some of them are ashamed to go to school or, when they do go, they no longer look at the blackboard and concentrate on the way they are dressed. We give them a small school allowance, and some have become top of their class.
Football and chocolate
We have also set up a football training centre where we try to integrate street children with no means of support. They received both academic and football training. If they don’t do well in school, maybe they’ll do well in sport? One of our teams plays in the national championship. We’re busy organising an international tournament, as well as promoting the launch of new chocolate bars and talking about chocolate and the children we take off the streets. Those are our plans for the moment.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the price at the edge of the cocoa field has risen by 50%. An excellent thing for producers, but not without its challenges for cooperatives.
They need to have sufficient cash flow to buy cocoa and sell it on consignment. We have some financing and a small amount of working capital. Some of the exporters also give us advances so that we can collect cocoa from our members and deliver it to them. But the cooperatives face competition from trackers who overpay for the cocoa and sometimes take it across borders. This is a real problem.
What were your expectations of the World Cocoa Conference?
Everyone is talking about a decent income for producers. But for that to happen, you have to pay a decent price for your cocoa. Everyone talks about it, but few actually implement it. The big industrial players are not really present at the conference, perhaps because they don’t want to pay a fair price. Why is that? That’s what we need to understand, because if producers are paid properly, these problems of child labour and forest destruction will be much easier to solve. If you don’t get a good price for your cocoa, you destroy the forest to produce even more and try to make ends meet. Many people are also disgusted with the cocoa sector and are leaving. Today, the farm-gate price has risen from 1,000 FCFA to 1,500 FCFA, which is an excellent thing, but for how long?
