Focused Assessment: Fair Compensation in Côte d’Ivoire’s Cocoa Sector
The Fair Labor Association (FLA) conducted a fair compensation-focused assessment in 2022 in Côte d’Ivoire and analyzed the data in 2023 to better understand compensation management systems and practices in the cocoa supply chain, the legal wage system, workers’ profiles, and workers’ compensation systems based on their employment relationships.
The assessment consisted of desktop research, household profiling, farm wage data collection, and wage data conversion and analysis. The fieldwork took place from October 13, 2022, to October 27, 2022, with visits to three cooperatives from high cocoa-production regions (San Pedro, Soubré, and Duékoué) in the southwest of the country. The FLA team interviewed 90 workers at the cocoa farms of these cooperatives (30 per cooperative) and 13 cooperative leaders to collect wage data. After excluding the outliers and incomplete data, FLA analyzed the wage data of 97 workers and leaders, which included 54 hired farm workers (including one sharecropper), 38 unpaid immediate family workers, and five paid family workers.
This analysis revealed that only the sharecropper’s earnings approached the living wage reference value, with the rest of the farmworkers making much less than the sharecropper, the referenced minimum wage (XOF 75,000), and the World Bank Poverty Line (XOF 51,231.5). Furthermore, more than half of the sharecropper’s compensation was provided as in-kind benefits.
The analysis also identified that discussions between cocoa actors on living and sustainable incomes for farmers often do not include increasing production costs (i.e., labor costs or workers’ wages). Farmers’ production costs must include fair wages to workers.
Based on the analysis, FLA recommends that companies operating in, or sourcing from, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa sector take the following actions:
- Collect additional wage data to better analyze workers’ wage levels against international benchmarks;
- Work with suppliers and farmers to raise workers’ wages;
- Work with suppliers and farmers to reduce the proportion of in-kind benefits; and
- Share wage data and learnings with stakeholders to improve collaboration.
Looking ahead, FLA will continue to collect data on workers’ wages and create wage ladders to provide insight and input into the discussion around sustainable income for farmers.