GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
System Change for Cocoa, with Antonie Fountain
This week we talk to Antonie Fountain, a trailblazer in sustainable practices and co-founder of Voice Network and Vocal Alliance. He takes us on his transformative journey from marketing to becoming a leading advocate for sustainable cocoa and coffee supply chains. He also offers a deeply personal perspective on the fight for social justice within the industry.
Together we talk about the shift from voluntary initiatives, to mandatory regulations in European supply chains and the critical role these changes play in combatting deforestation and upholding human rights.
Our chat with Antonie shines a light on systemic issues like farmer poverty and the need to combat human trafficking and forced labour, as we look at the wider sustainability agenda for global commodities.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Anthony Fontaine, the Managing Director and Co-Founder at Voice Network, where he works on sustainable cocoa, and Co-Founder at Vocal Alliance, which is focused on sustainable coffee supply chains.
Speaker 3:And so Anthony is one of the co-paysector's leading experts on sustainability, ranging from farmer income, child labour, gender equality, deforestation. Most recently which is where we met has been working on new EU regulations on deforestation and supply chains. As well as all of that, he's a keynote speaker, advocate, campaigner, writer, researcher, long-distance cyclist, father and husband, erstwhile wannabe rock star I think we need to find out about that, anthony and also a knight in the national order of the Republic of the Cote d'Ivoire. So, anthony, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Damron and myself. Thanks for having me. So, first of all, we always like to kick off with a bit of sort of like personal journey art thing. So how did you become this expert on sustainability and commodities? And, of course, we'll have to get the backstory behind being a knight.
Speaker 4:Well, I think both of those are the same. Backstory is that I've been doing this since 2006. And so really been pursuing the same problems. It started for me with child labor and child trafficking in Coco, started to really hit the media etc. And at some point that came across my road and I was personally hit by the injustice of that and I really started looking for ways how can I get involved in that?
Speaker 4:Not that I was particularly fond of chocolate or involved in the child labor conversation, but sometimes you bump into something that hits you personally and I felt personally offended by the fact that we were still dealing with these kind of issues in the 21st century. And so, back in the day, I was working in marketing at the time and, through a whole series of coincidences, within about four weeks of coming across this problem, I handed in my resignation and helped set up a small campaigning organization in the Netherlands against this, and have been working at it ever since. And sometimes you know the whole idea. You hear this African saying is like how you eat an elephant one bite at a time. And so how did I come to the place where we are now, 19 years later, where indeed there's also recognition for the work that we're doing. It's really by doing it one bite at a time, but also by being quite persistent, and I think that that's I'm just really stubborn.
Speaker 3:And being a knight.
Speaker 4:Anthony, yeah, I was surprised by that myself as well, because the Ivorian government does not often hand out recognitions like this to civil society organizations, right?
Speaker 4:I mean they do that, you know, to industry leaders and to kind of government officials and heads of state of other countries, and so I was very surprised having that happen as well, the countries, and so I was very surprised having that happen as well. But I mean, for the last 19 years we've been working very hard for the improvement of the lives of cocoa farmers and cocoa farming communities and households and their children, and so apparently this came across their desk and at some point they were like let's do something about that. Now, in all honesty, and just to downplay this a little bit, the ceremony where I got my knighthood, I was at the lowest tier of decoration and there were people that were being decorated with much bigger medals, et cetera, et cetera, than I was, and so I'm very grateful for it. But it's also it's and it's a real recognition as well. So we're very humbled by it, but at the same time, it's not what you do it for, but it's lovely to have Wow.
Speaker 2:Anthony, that's really great. And when you say child labor and child trafficking, there is nothing left much to talk about. But we have to talk about all the supply chain and everything linked with Cocoa this podcast. So I'm so sorry to jump into another question, but I think we will circle back to this. You have written and spoken recently about the measures being taken to halt deforestation in european supply. Give our listeners a sense of how big the changes are that are coming and what kind of a difference they might take.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so the changes are actually quite fundamental, and it's not just on deforestation, it's also on these human rights issues such as child labor, gender equality and farmer income as well. And the changes are real, fundamental in the way that so far like the conversation about sustainable supply chains has been going on since some people would say the 1960s. Others would say like with the fair trade movement, the way it started, others would say since the 1980s when the fair trade label started, et cetera. Other people would say, well, maybe the SDGs or the Millennium Development Goals, et cetera. So it's been a discussion of decades, but all of the ways that that has been done so far have been voluntary. So basically we're also from a civil society perspective.
Speaker 4:You're pushing companies to commitments, you're trying to get companies to do the right thing, to make the right choices, and the changes that are happening right now are actually going to the core of that idea, because we're actually moving from it being a voluntary thing, where you're getting companies you should do the right thing, to it becoming mandatory, where companies are going to have to do things differently if they still want to operate in the European market. And so I think the sea change there cannot be overestimated, how fundamental. The shift is from making it a voluntary thing to making it a sustainability, to making it a mandatory thing, and I think the main reason for that is like we have spent decades talking about these issues. Right, because child labor is not a new thing, pharma poverty is not a new thing, deforestation is not a new thing, and we've been spending decades throwing solutions at the problem as well, and none of it is working. And my thesis is the reason why we haven't solved the problems is because we didn't have to solve the problems, and that is going to change.
Speaker 3:So in terms of solving problems, and just to focus back in on Coco Anthony, which you know, I think you could be justifiably seen as being a global expert on the voice network, has this barometer that you published? Hasn't it around um how much progress is being made on that commodity across a series of indices?
Speaker 3:and I think it'd be lovely to explain a little bit from your perspective how much progress you think has been made. But then, um, also how cocoa is a commodity right now is really fascinating. It's been hit globally by problems around climate change as well, so cocoa is fascinating. What changes have you been monitoring over the last few years?
Speaker 4:I would say that we've seen almost every indicator on the dial change in the 19 years that I've been doing this, from the issues around human rights through environmental protection, through the socioeconomic thing. We understand every problem better than we did 10 years ago. We've got better data on every aspect of the problems than we did 10 years ago and in some of these challenges we've actually got some models and programs that even seem to work, if you know if at pilot scale, some at larger scale, et cetera. So we've got a lot more progress on that level. We've also got a lot more involvement of all the different actors at the table right. It used to be that you had the industry players and you had the governments, and then you had farmers and NGOs. They're on the outside. They weren't heard. Everybody regularly meets each other.
Speaker 4:Now that doesn't mean that we've solved this problem of inclusion and in fact there's some real issues of you know, the industry very often tries to solve problems on their own and then they're surprised that their lowest common denominator approaches don't work Right. But we see a lot more interaction. We see a lot more conversation. We also see a lot more acknowledgement of the problems that are there. But at the same time, we've also seen no progress at all, like there are more children and child labor in cocoa now than there were 20 years ago.
Speaker 4:There is more deforestation now than ever before in the cocoa sector, and in fact, most cocoa comes from West Africa, cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, and the data shows that at least 95% of the original rainforest has just disappeared from Cote d'Ivoire. It's like there's no more forest left to cut down, except for a few parks that are left, and so that's a huge issue, and farmers are still incredibly poor. So, like all three of these big buckets that we're trying to solve the economic, the social and the environmental side are all dealing with huge issues that we still haven't solved yet, but we've made massive progress despite all that. Now the big question, then, is have we made that progress so that we're ready to solve the problems now, or have we just made a lot of progress on the issues that don't matter and we haven't made progress on the issues that do? I honestly don't have an answer to that question.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a lot of big questions with maybe big but sometimes easy answers. But I don't know which one that one will fall into, because I think it's another very big one. I mean, we have growers, we have traders, we have processors, retailers, and then we have us as consumers. There are many, many links in this chain of supply. This must make commodities a really complex space to work with. How do you navigate this? And also, as consumers, how can we take a greater responsibility and how can we make some impact for maybe good chocolate, I may say?
Speaker 4:So those are two different questions. So, I think, from a sector-wide, how do you work on impact? I think it's the same answer as I gave all the way at the beginning of this conversation. Right, it's just keep going at it. Eat the elephant, one bite at a time, right? And I think that we tend to think we can solve all the problems in a year and we're always disappointed that we haven't solved it in a year. Right? But we're trying to change systems and you never measure system change in one year increments. And so I often say we need a longer perspective, we need to look back 10, 15, 20 years to say how much of the system have we changed? Not just 12 months, right? And so for me, part of the solution from a sector-wide perspective is to have a much broader perspective and to use the right measurement scale around what success looks like.
Speaker 4:Where it comes to consumers, I actually am starting, or have for a while been, of the opinion that this shouldn't be a consumer problem, because, you know, I'm one of probably one of the 25, 30 people in the world that knows most about sustainable cocoa. But even I find it hard to choose unequivocally between one bar of chocolate or another bar of chocolate in a supermarket, because it also depends on what do you find important. Is deforestation more important to you than child labor? Or is farmer poverty more important? Or gender equality or organic organic it's all these things together. If I, as one of the world's leading experts, have a hard time deciding what to buy, then how can I expect a consumer to do that? And that's just on one topic. You walk into a supermarket. There are 5,000 products in an average supermarket. There's no way you can expect a consumer to know all these things right. So it shouldn't be a matter of consumer choice. It should be a matter of regulatory responsibility whether or not it's allowed to be sold in the first place.
Speaker 3:So I could derail our conversation, because that opens up a huge question around the role of consumer. I find it fascinating. There was quite a while where, um in the here in the uk, people were printing the grams of co2 on crisp packets uh, potato chips and and it's one of those moments where you you reflect, you think there's no way any consumer has any sense of what that means in terms of climate impacts of this packet of Chris. Why are we putting consumers into that space? It is really fascinating. When it comes to sustainable sourcing, I think this opens up a huge, really interesting kind of retail narrative. What are the stories you tell about the responsibility of your operation and is it more around assurance than it is? You know, choice X, y or Z. What do you think?
Speaker 4:So and that brings me back to the point I just brought up I don't think it should be a consumer choice, because we don't have that.
Speaker 4:And you know, even this whole idea of carbon footprint was actually invented or popularized by the British Petroleum Company in order to avoid having conversations about what the responsibility was of British petrol, right?
Speaker 4:So this whole idea of individual consumer choice is a massive win from the PR side of large companies as well as governments that like a neoliberal, deregulated sector, because it actually transfer the place where responsibility should lie, with the regulator and with the corporations, to the place where it shouldn't lie, which is just with individuals. Now, of course, we all have a role to play individually, right, but our individual roles are tiny compared to any one of the massive system actors, right. And so that's where I think that we keep needing to talk about why this needs to be something that is not a matter of voluntary choice, but of mandatory compliance. And every one of the big system actors, whether that's fossil fuel companies, whether that's large multinationals, whether that is governments, have a role to play, and they are not playing their role at the moment, and they are using consumers and individuals as a scapegoat so that they don't have to do their job.
Speaker 3:I don't even need to check in with Damla to know that she's been blown away by that. Damla, before you come back in, just one tiny little thing I wanted to follow up on, anthony, which is regenerative. Agriculture is kind of buzzed which is bouncing around at the moment and I'm quite interested by the fact that there are multiple definitions of it in the commodity sector and I really think there's a risk there of a new kind of greenwashing being pushed out to consumers.
Speaker 4:What do you think about that? There's buzzwords that come and go the whole time, right, and so, like, agriculture used to be regenerative for a very long time. Right, although even there you can have your conversations around whether, like, original agriculture in Europe was regenerative, because basically the area that I live in in the Netherlands, the whole Netherlands, used to be a forest and now it's agricultural fields right? So even the old fashioned regen ag that we all claim was used to be sustainable cut down all the old growth forests in Europe, right? So I think we need to be very aware that agriculture, in any context, has impact on the environment. Right Now, there are kinds of agriculture that are better than other where it comes to impact on the environment.
Speaker 4:We're big fans of agroforestry, but even then, within the concept of agroforestry, there's a wide spectrum of definitions, because any agricultural system that uses at least two crops, of which at least one is a tree, is already agroforestry. So you could have like massive green deserts with just one set of trees and then one set of shade crops and call it agroforestry, but that doesn't solve any of the biodiversity. It doesn't solve any of the or only a very marginal part of, the carbon capture aspect that it could do. It only does a very small part of what a dynamic or complex agroforestry system can do. So even then, there's a real spectrum there, right, and actually in Coco a couple of years ago, rittersport, the German chocolate company, started working on these great, really long-term agroforestry projects in Nicaragua, where the kind of the overstory trees that they were planting in their agroforestry system at a 70 to 90 year life cycle Now that's the kind of dynamic agroforestry that starts talking about. Okay, guys, this is great.
Speaker 4:But even then, a 70 to 90 year life cycle for your overstory trees is a fraction of what an old growth forest does. Even then the carbon capture that it does is a fraction of what an original forest does. Even then the biodiversity that that it does is a fraction of what an original forest does. Even then the biodiversity that it brings in is a fraction of what an old growth forest does. And even if you do your agroforestry perfect, it actually has quite some impact on your farm yields. And in many crops actually, there's like a non-overlapping Venn diagram between ideal overstory cover and maximum farm income potential, right, and so we're still trying to find the places where those Venn diagrams overlap better. But I'm a big fan. I think we should do it, but I think we also do need to really worry, be careful about the claims that we make, specifically about carbon capture.
Speaker 2:Steve, I'm forever in your depth, I think, because you made me meet Anthony, and this is amazing. I mean how crystal clear you are, anthony, and you cut to the chase. Leave all the buzzwords, let's say away and just see the point, pinpoint what's wrong, and thank you very much for this. So I have another question for you. To cut to the chase matter You've also been involved closer to home on human rights and trafficking. Tell us about that other side of your campaigning work, because it is so important.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So when I got involved in cocoa in the first place, it really was about trafficking of children in the cocoa plantations, et cetera, and a big part of my work there was. At some point when we started doing the work, we realized that it was tied into much broader systemic issues of farmer poverty and agency, et cetera, and so we started working on those issues. But there still are tens of thousands of kids doing and adults doing forced labor, trafficked labor, in the cocoa sector. But the organization that I helped set up back in 2006, at least the Dutch version was an organization called Stop the Traffic, and so we were working both in the anti-trafficking work in the cocoa sector but also the anti-trafficking work, for example, in the red light district and in other parts of Europe, and so for a while there was that, that double component that was deeply involved, and I think that that also reflects the fact that we can talk about the challenges that we have in global supply chains. But there's also a deeply neocolonial aspect to that if we don't also acknowledge that in our own communities there's a lot of injustice that's happening as well, and so we need to watch out that we don't become like a new version of either the trader or the missionary that was sent to Africa and Asia to convert the heathen or to earn money off them. And we need to be aware that actually the first field of work is ourselves and not the other right, and so I think that's the starting point, for that. Also in our own work is we're always looking at.
Speaker 4:Over the last couple of years we've really been working on decolonizing our own organizations, like how do we make sure that we're not just a bunch of white people telling people in Africa and Latin America what to do, and so kind of. Over the last years, for example, our board's composition has changed significantly. So the chair of our board is from Ghana. We have another person in our board is from Cote d'Ivoire, another person in our board is from Colombia and in fact we've only got two Europeans on the board. Now, that's the way it should be, but that didn't come by itself. That required active, conscious work saying, hey, how is our own institutional structure not working and how do we change that?
Speaker 3:goodness me. So in in terms of that and decolonizing your board, I think is well, that's fascinating, anthony. We need to pick up on that and do a separate podcast on strategies for decolonizing your organization, because it sounds amazing. Um, I just wanted to to. We're almost at time. I just wanted to pick up on um, what next? For? Well, actually it's tripartite, isn't it? Because you've got, uh, the work on coco, the work with vocal on coffee, um, and your portfolio of wider personal projects that are always pretty active there. So, what's your plan, master plan for 2025? What's on the cards?
Speaker 4:So for 2025, one of the things that we're really working on is further establishing our work in coffee, so what we've been doing in Coco for the last 15 years at Voice. We're celebrating the 15th anniversary of Voice this year, but this is only the second year of vocal so in coffee, and so we're really looking at how can we make that much more established and much broader. I'm also starting to get involved in several other commodities, have been involved in the cotton conversation for the last couple of years and, steve, you and I met each other at a conference on palm oil and I find palm oil and soy and other tropical commodities very fascinating. My really long-term strategy and my master plan is to see how what we do, what we have done in cocoa over the past years, is we've organized countervailing power, because it doesn't matter where you are and in what sector you are, there will always be power. Whether that power is corporate or whether that power is government, it doesn't matter, there's always power. That power will have to be held accountable, and the best way to hold that power accountable is by working together, and that's what we do at Vocal, that's what we do at Voices.
Speaker 4:We help organize the countervailing power, and so my long-term master plan is to have a whole bunch of these different voices across a whole range of commodities, which is what I'm calling a chorus of voices that will be holding the powers, that be accountable, regardless of whether they're corporate or whether they're government, because that differs per location.
Speaker 4:Like in the case of cotton, some of the governments, like China and Kazakhstan, the government plays a really important role in the case of coffee as well, like the Vietnamese government plays a really important role in Vietnam, and Vietnam is the world's number two producer of coffee. So so you can't just talk about the corporate side of stuff, you also have to talk about what's the government's role here as well. And so the master plan is to work on those visions and to go forward. And but it's it's, it's exciting. Coco is in its craziest year that it ever has, so nobody knows what next month will bring, let alone next year. And so it's also always be flexible, always run with roll with the punches and be able to move quickly when it's necessary.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. I mean, we really want to go on forever with you, anthony, but we have to cut to the chase now with you, anthony, but we have to cut to the chase now. Final question Our network is ironically called Do Not Smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:I love cycling. I'm a middle-aged white guy in my late 40s by now, and when I turned 40, there's like an unwritten rule in the contract that says when you turn 40 and you're a white middle-aged guy with an office job, you have to start riding a bicycle. And so over the last six, seven years I've picked that up with a vengeance and I never get off the bike, worse than I got on it. It is always a good idea to go for a bike ride.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. So, anthony, well, in the UK I don't know whether you get it over there in the Netherlands we actually describe those very men as mammals.
Speaker 4:Yes, absolutely Exactly. So that would be me, that would be me, so yeah.
Speaker 3:Well with the vision of you in Lycra. I want to thank you. Thank you for that was an amazing conversation, anthony. That was just uh, really, really enlightening. We touched on agriculture a few times on this podcast, but, uh, the power you're bringing to that space is amazing, so, thank you so much. Damla, would you like to wrap this up?
Speaker 3:so thanks to everyone who has listened to our good guys podcast, brought to you by the do not smile network of agencies and make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, Damla Anthony, see you soon. Bye.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Good Guys, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS network.
