Summary
The Rainforest Alliance and its partner the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) started working to mainstream sustainable practices in the cocoa industry through the SAN/Rainforest Alliance certification program in the late 1990s. Our program establishes a norm for sustainable cocoa farming (the SAN Standard), evaluates attainment of this norm by participating farmers, and awards Rainforest Alliance Certified status to farms meeting this standard. The program also helps build consumer demand and market incentives for sustainable cocoa products while simultaneously supporting cocoa producers to farm more sustainably, productively, and profitably. This report answers the question: what have been
the effects of the SAN/Rainforest Alliance cocoa program on cocoa-producing farms, households, and landscapes? To make this assessment, it analyzed performance for a large
sample of certified cocoa farms (186 out of 266 total certificates available at the close of 2015), representing just over 170,000 individual farms across five countries: Côte d’Ivoire,
Ghana, Ecuador, Peru, and Indonesia.