Ivory Coast and Ghana the world’s top two cocoa producers teamed up this month to impose a minimum floor price that chocolate companies must pay if they want to access their more than 60% share of global supply.

It’s an attempt to ease pervasive farmer poverty that has become a blight on chocolate’s image and a threat to the sector’s future in West Africa, as young people walk away from a life of backbreaking labor with little reward.

A meeting on July 3 will hash out the details. But industry players, fair trade campaigners and even fellow producer countries are at odds over whether a price fixing strategy is the answer.

While some applaud the nations’ aim to use their market dominance to improve farmer incomes, others worry the strategy could push companies to buy their beans elsewhere - or over-stimulate production, leading to a global price crash.

Under the plan, Ivory Coast and Ghana will fix the floor price at $2,600 per tonne free-on-board and have announced a suspension of forward sales until the plan is put in place.

It’s not the first attempt to improve the lot of farmers.

Third-party certification schemes such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ grant bonuses to growers meeting social and environmental standards. Cocoa companies have their own sustainability programs. And Ghana and Ivory Coast both guarantee a farmer price at the start of each season.

But those measures haven’t solved the problem.

“If you have a model that’s based on the gross exploitation of suppliers, it simply cannot work sustainably,” Edward George, an independent cocoa expert, told Reuters.

The Cocoa Barometer, a biannual report published by civil society groups, calculates that farmers receive just 6.6% of the sale price for a bar of chocolate.

And last year a Fairtrade International survey found that just 12% of Ivorian cocoa-farming households earned $2.50 per person per day, a level it calculated to be the living income benchmark.

It’s a situation that angers Kinimo, who is missing a finger on his left hand, the result of an accident on his plantation.

“It’s not normal at all that they, the ones eating the chocolate, set the price. The farmer should set the price,” he argued.

 “The cars that they make, who sets the price for those? They do, and we buy them.”

#Reuters