A landmark first joint meeting between the Swiss Platforms for Sustainable Cocoa and Coffee has placed tackling climate change and delivering human rights protections for workers, writes Neill Barston.

The recent meeting earlier this month in Vevey, Switzerland, was held in a combined format that recognised that both industries faced similar major challenges within their respective supply chains.

Among its core highlights was an assertion that a faster pace of change is required in order to deliver sustainability goals which have formed part of companies strategies for the past two decades, yet as our title has covered, decisive results have not achieved key results – including eliminating child labour, or significantly reversing deforestation-linked damage from large-scale industrial activity.

According to cocoa’s national trade body (Swissco), around 200 representatives from business, civil society, research and the public sector gathered to take forward the respective 2030 plans, acknowledging that collaboration will be key to achieving results across its own sector, and that of the coffee world. 

The event reportedly included a subsequent panel discussion focused on how a sustainable future can be achieved for communities that grow cocoa and coffee. In the thematic breakout sessions, participants also discussed concrete approaches to improving producers’ incomes and wages, nature-based solutions for coffee and cocoa cultivation, and joint approaches to managing human rights risks.

At the annual general meeting, they discussed the results of a recent survey. Thanks to the high level of participation in the member surveys, both Platforms gained important insights into the status of their members’ sustainability efforts.

The assessment shows that living incomes are the top priority, but that implementing them poses the greatest challenge – which as Confectionery Production has reported, become increasingly difficult as core supplier nations in Ghana and Ivory Coast have reduced farmer pay by 60% and 40% respectively this year in light of commodity price falls from a peak in 2025 of around $12,000 a tonne of cocoa, which slid to around $3,000. This has now risen to over $5,000 a tonne, leaving notable uncertainty surrounding prospects for the remainder of the year, especially given major warnings of adverse El Nino weather conditions.

 Sustainable cocoa imports 
Notably, every year, the Cocoa Platform publishes import statistics showing the proportion of sustainable cocoa out of total imports into Switzerland. In 2025, 92% of the cocoa bean equivalents imported into Switzerland came from sustainable production. This volume is either certified to internationally recognised standards such as Fairtrade Max Havelaar or Rainforest Alliance, or comes from companies’ own programmes that are verified by independent third parties. Compared with the previous year, 2024, this represents an increase of 8 percentage points.

The Cocoa body asserted that it remained proud of this result, noting that companies’ certification and verification programmes make an important contribution to promoting more sustainable production practices. 

Notably, the platform will continue its efforts to achieve 100% by 2030. However, to effectively address the social and environmental challenges in cocoa-producing countries and achieve genuine sustainability, more ambitious targets must be pursued.