Meet Robert Nsiah, co- founder of Green Tropics. Having launched Green Tropics back in 1993, he’s been at the forefront of the fight for fair and sustainable cacao farming in Eastern Ghana for nearly three decades. Now retired, his work with Green Tropics is a true labour of love. He’s still hard at it every day, working with us to improve the lives, lands and communities of cacao farmers.

Since Zoom calls are often hampered by poor internet in the rural regions Robert works in, he was kind enough to answer some of our questions via email as we seek to encapsulate a 20-year relationship in just a few words. Perhaps we should start at the beginning.

It’s 2002. AOL is the most popular website in the world, web pages take an average of 16 seconds to load, and ‘Shakira’ is the 3^rd most popular search term of the year.

The Queen is in her Golden Jubilee year, and a plucky British chocolatier called Hotel Chocolat recognises that their growing business needs a larger cacao supply to meet demand.

Fast-forward 20 years, and that plucky chocolatier is celebrating 20 years’ working with a truly exceptional organisation; Green Tropics Group.

The cacao industry has long been one of complexity; in 2002, practically every West African cacao-growing region was mired in unethical labour conditions. And, sadly, much of the market operates the same today. Low market rates force farmers into short-term farming practices that cause deforestation and many other climate-change accelerating problems.

So, conventional wisdom dictated, if we wanted to be an ethical chocolatier, we should go somewhere else and not look back.

South America, for example, has many cacao-growing regions within which more robust frameworks enable more ethical supply lines. Of course, this is not to say things were, or are, perfect – far from it – but many ethically conscious chocolatiers decide that they have a better chance of ethical production by avoiding West Africa.

We think differently.

We believe in doing the right thing, and on seeing the scale of the challenge, the right thing was to be part of the solution. We got involved. Unlike many chocolatiers, who outsource as much of the production process as possible, we knew it was important to understand and experience the industry on the ground.

In 2002, as a small, independent company, we simply didn’t have the power or leverage to ‘fix’ the industry. But we were undeterred. We started by learning, assessing, working hard and getting lots of advice from agricultural experts in the area.

The area we chose was the Nkawkaw district, Ghana, and the agricultural experts were Green Tropics Group.

Green Tropics helped us to understand the needs of the land, the farmers and the communities in Nkawkaw.

With their insight and guidance, we tried to help where we could. We’ve always paid much higher than market-rate. That was a start. If an area lacked a clean drinking water supply, we built a borehole. 8 of them at last count. We realised that many people were forced to travel for miles to get medical help, so we built a medical facility.

Quality cacao requires expert cultivation and exceptional seedlings, which are more expensive. We provided thousands of them, free of charge, to farmers. We recognised the devastating effects of deforestation long before it became a buzzword, and we planted over 1.5m trees. We trained many hundreds of young farmers in best practice, helping them learn the skills to produce more, better cacao while protecting the land.

None of this would have been possible without Green Tropics.

While we are proud of our work in the early years, we also recognised where it could be improved. Over time we realised that we were reacting to issues, when to exact meaningful change, we needed to be more proactive.

As our business grew, we were able to pay more and invest more in infrastructure. Green Tropics helped us to understand some of the more complex agricultural issues that affect crop yield, longevity and sustainability.

We asked Robert to pick out some of his most treasured highlights from our 20-year partnership.

The 10-day visit to Ghana by Angus, the CEO of Hotel Chocolat.

“This high-level visit and the painstaking efforts by Angus and his colleagues at gaining a deeper insight into the circumstances of the Ghanaian smallholder farmer is a clear demonstration of Hotel Chocolat’s long-term commitment to raising the standard of living of the Ghanaian smallholder cocoa farmer. The visit has cemented our partnership with Hotel Chocolat and challenged us at Greeen Tropics Group to work harder to ensure the realisation of the objectives of the Kookoo Daakyepa Scheme.”

The launch of Kookoo Daakyepa

Known as Gentle Farming in English, Robert describes its methodology concisely; “{Kookoo Daakyepa} commits Hotel Chocolat to voluntarily provide the needed resources for interventions aimed at raising productivity and improving livelihoods of smallholder cocoa farmers in a sustainable manner, within the context of biodiversity conservation.”

The Osuben medical centre

“Hotel Chocolat’s generous funding of a state-of-the-art medical centre at Osuben which has improved access of resource poor farmers and their families to modern healthcare services and contributed to improving the standard of living of farmers in one of the most deprived cocoa growing communities in Ghana.”

To us, success is more than pure profit margins – it’s the knowledge that we’re doing the right thing, making a difference, and bringing happiness through cacao.

Particularly since launching our pioneering Gentle Farming initiative in Ghana, we can sleep at night knowing we’re helping to transform the lives and lands of thousands of farmers in one of the world’s most complex and challenging environments.

We couldn’t do it without Green Tropics and our ‘real partnership, built on altruism’. Here’s to the next twenty years of ethical, sustainable cacao farming.