Ninety percent of the world’s cocoa is You probably grown on small family farms by around know all I’m 13 and live in Enfield. six million farmers. about I want to tell you chocolate. It about my journey to find is one of our out where the cocoa in favourite treats chocolate comes from. in the UK. Every year we each eat about 11kg of chocolate in this country. That means about six people are eating a bar every second! That might seem very big but cocoa is not like most other food And it’s not just chocolate bars crops. A cocoa farm does not look that are so popular but hot like most other farms at all. Cocoa chocolate, and chocolatey trees need shade, so they grow under face creams and bubble baths… the cover of other trees in forests. Hi. I’m Tayna. my fairtrade Fairtrade cocoa farmers on average have farms of 2.7 hectares. That’s about three-and-a-half times a full-size football pitch. adventure fairtrade.org.uk/schools o’s Rosend led s cal village i s Los Braezoare r and the olds eh 32 hothuesre. Rosendo has a wife, Ramona, and six children. One of his daughters lives in the capital, Santo Domingo. Mariella. She is only a little older than me. The sacks are stacked from floor to ceiling. This is the point at which they leave the Dominican Republic. In a factory in Europe they get roasted and pressed, which separates the cocoa butter, liquid chocolate and cocoa powder. The liquid chocolate and cocoa butter are mixed with sugar and milk, and sometimes other ingredients, to make chocolate. And some of the cocoa that has been grown by Rosendo and his neighbours in Los Brazos is sold on Fairtrade terms. This means the farmers get a fair price, and the Fairtrade Premium to invest in their business and communities. Cocoa trees are a bit different too. The fruit of a cocoa tree, the cocoa pod, grows directly from the trunk, not from the ends of the branches like most fruit. Have you ever seen another tree like this? This is Rosendo Vasquez He is a cocoa farmer I met in the Dominican Republic. He belongs to a cocoa cooperative – a group of farmers – called CONACADO. There are 10,000 farmers in CONACADO. These are the rest of his children, his wife and his father Manuel. This is Rosendo’s daughter And cocoa farms aren’t just different because they grow in forests. Cocoa trees only grow in hot, humid places with lots of rain. They grow in tropical areas, including in South and Central America, Africa, parts of Asia… Working together as a co-operative benefits everyone. Rosendo has been farming cocoa since 1982. He owns one hectare of land and rents three more. He told me all about the cocoa that he grows. He harvests his cocoa twice a year. He told me that ‘to work the land is very hard work’. These beans are now dried, smelling deliciously chocolately and ready to go into sacks and be shipped to Europe. In Los Brazos they have used the Fairtrade Premium to bring piped water into their homes meaning they no longer have to walk 4km each way to collect water from a stream, which took several hours. A cocoa tree has to be three or four years old before it starts producing cocoa pods. Cocoa pods can be red, yellow or green. After five days the pulp has gone and the beans are just right. It is really hot inside there! Now they must be dried. At the drying centre beans are dried in these structures that look a bit like greenhouses. If it is raining sometimes they need to go in a drying machine, which is like an oven. Rosendo told me: Fairtrade means to me: progress. ...and the Caribbean, where I visited some farmers in the Dominican Republic. Inside the cocoa pod there are lots of cocoa beans, surrounded by sweet, fruity pulp. You can eat the pulp straight from the pod. It tastes good but not at all like chocolate! If you want to use your cocoa beans to make chocolate, they need to ‘ferment’ in the pulp for five days, a process that develops the taste. Some farmers do this under banana leaves and sacks. Rosendo’s beans go to the Conacado drying centre where they get fermented in big boxes. This is just one of the ways being in a co-operative and working together can be helpful for farmers. Now Rosendo does not have to ferment and dry his own beans, which means more time to tend to his cocoa trees. He is able to save some money, which his father could never do. ‘Before we were in Fairtrade we… didn’t know about the prices. Now we are getting better prices and after the harvest we receive the Premium’. he hopes in the future he will be able to buy more land, as this would increase the amount he can earn. He would also like to ensure his children have an education and get good jobs. And it’s not just water that Los Brazos have benefited from. They now have electricity and toilets, all from the Fairtrade Premium. So chocolate doesn’t just taste good – it can do good too. Registered charity no. 1043886