Whose Cocoa Life? Power, sustainability and inequality in the global chocolate industry

This small square of chocolate reflects the widespread poverty facing an estimated six million small farmers in the Global South, many earning less than $1 a day. Low incomes feed into pressures on families, including reliance on child labour, and contribute to ecological destruction, as farmers attempt to protect revenues by expanding into virgin forests.

While well intentioned, this graphic is intended for a western audience. By linking poverty, child labour and deforestation to farmers’ low-price share, the problem becomes one of unfair market distribution – something seemingly solvable through market friendly interventions, such as ‘fair’ prices through ethical consumption or commitments from chocolate manufacturers to eradicate child labour and deforestation from their supply chains.

This diverts attention away from questions about how the organisation of cocoa production underpins unequal power relations among farmers, states, commodity traders, and chocolate manufacturers.

From the angle of production, we can go beyond the ethical organisation of markets and begin to ask why farmer’s profits are so low. Why is the cocoa sector (worth an estimated $17 billion) and the chocolate industry (worth an estimated $130 billion), reliant on the labour of small family farms often forced to sell cocoa bean below their cost of production?

To what extent do the unequal value shares in a chocolate bar mirror the underlying structural asymmetries in production, trade, and finance between the Global North and Global South? These are some of the questions that lie at the heart of my research project, Cocoa and Capitalism, which investigates the political economy of cocoa production in Ghana and Ecuador. Through historical and contemporary research, the project explores how cocoa economies have been shaped by colonial legacies, capitalism, and national development pathways. The following story emerged from a recent research trip to Ghana.

Mondelēz and Cocoa Life

The American multinational confectionery company Mondelēz claims to be concerned with sustainability in the global cocoa sector. However, a recent dispute in Ghana over the rights to ‘Cocoa Life’ suggests otherwise.

In April this year, the Acting Country Lead of Mondelēz’s Cocoa Life in Ghana sent a letter to the host of the TV programme My Cocoa Life, expressing concerns about trademark infringement and a conflict of commercial interests. In a short period, Mondelēz ensnarled a team of young Ghanaian journalists in a wave of veiled legal threats, demanding they change their name.

This dispute encapsulates long-standing power disparities in the global cocoa economy, where the interests of transnational firms override those of cocoa farmers and local communities. It illustrates a structural pattern in which international business actors retain authority over producing countries, their farmers, and the meaning and organisation of life and work in the global cocoa economy.

The story also shines a critical light on the marketing messaging of international chocolate brands, which often emphasises their work to end child labour and promote environmentally sustainable cocoa production. These messages are targeted at Western consumers, who, in choosing to buy certified chocolate, are positioning as empowered actors. Meanwhile, the treatment of cocoa farmers is concealed, their voices largely absent from these narratives.

The Characters

Cocoa Life is the ‘sustainability’ arm of Mondelēz International, one the most significant players in the global chocolate industry and owner of brands including Oreo, Toblerone and Cadbury. In 2024, Mondelēz reported net revenues of approximately $36 billion and its latest 2025 market capitalisation hovers around $81 billion.

When Cocoa Life was launched in 2012 with a reported budget of $1 billion to run up to 2030, Mondelez became the first international chocolate corporation to terminate partnerships with third-party certification schemes like Fairtrade. It sources cocoa entirely in-house, with no minimum price guarantees or publicly verifiable commitments to environmental practices or labour standards. As a form of self-certification, the Cocoa Life logo is used principally as a signal of corporate responsibility that speaks to the concerns of Western consumers. This, in a nutshell, is the purpose of the brand.

My Cocoa Life, by contrast, is a Ghanaian agro-media organisation led by young journalists and documentary filmmakers. Established in 2022, My Cocoa Life hosts the only national TV program in Ghana dedicated to the concerns of around 800,000 cocoa producing families, broadcast free to cocoa farming communities. My Cocoa Life has established itself as an important platform where cocoa farmers can raise their voices against issues such as deforestation, illegal gold mining, and low farm gate prices. It has organised nationwide farmers’ rallies and created the first national forum for emerging farmer leaders: the All Farmers Cooperatives Convention.

My Cocoa Life generates no profit from the cocoa supply chain. It survives through sponsorship partnerships with Ghanaian businesses within the national cocoa ecosystem of farmers, fertiliser producers and equipment manufacturers. This ecosystem generates domestic economic value, contrasting with vertically integrated, opaque supply chains like Cocoa Life, which operate largely outside public scrutiny.

The Letter

The letter from Mondelēz to My Cocoa Life begins by stating that Cocoa Life’s purpose in Ghana is to empower farmers and support sustainable cocoa production – a purpose it says it shares with My Cocoa Life.

Yet the letter quickly pivots to intellectual property, arguing that the similarity between the two names could create confusion and jeopardise their shared goal of supporting sustainable cocoa farming.

The real issue, it turns out, lies in the the value of the Cocoa Life trademark as an "asset" for Mondelēz which is now under threat from a farmer-focused media organisation. The letter finishes by "kindly" requesting "entirely without prejudice" that My Cocoa Life should change its name.

This approach exemplifies the structural inequalities in the global cocoa economy. If a media group working alongside cocoa farmers in Ghana can be considered a threat to the value of assets held by a company like Mondelēz, it raises questions about the purpose of corporate commitments to sustainable production practices and the agency of cocoa farming communities who adopt them.

Who defines sustainability in the industry? Why does sustainability exclude production costs and profits for farmers? Who sets the terms of trade in global cocoa markets?

While the young journalists of My Cocoa Life have helped bring these issues into public view, meaningful answers can only come from cocoa farming communities in Ghana, acting as organised political agents rather than as passive recipients of corporate sustainability interventions.

Encouragingly, under their new name ‘My Cocoa Business’, this work will continue through the next All Farmers Cooperatives Convention, strengthening spaces where farmers define their own futures.

A year earlier, in an ironic legal twist, a class action lawsuit was launched in the United States accusing Mondelēz of deceptively claiming its products are 100% sustainable when it knowingly pays farmers as a little as $3 a day, forcing families to resort to the labour of children. Such legal cases have been successfully contested by Mondelēz because, paradoxically, the plaintiffs have never been able to penetrate the supply chains that feed its Cocoa Life initiative.