Listening Before Designing: A Visit to Cocoa Producers in Ecuador

Together with Christine Jurt (BFH-HAFL) and colleagues from the University of Guayaquil, Michelle Viera and Fanny Jaramillo, we met with 17 cocoa producers in Milagro, Ecuador, during a field trip for our Transdisciplinary Research Platform project. The open-access platform is co-funded by BFH’s Thematic Field in Sustainable Development and the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa through its SWISSCO Peer Learning and Collaboration Projects initiative. The platform is designed to support bachelor’s and master’s students, both in Switzerland and internationally, in co-creating responses to complex societal challenges by using transdisciplinary lenses. The platform, currently under development, will encourage students to examine complex challenges through three simultaneous interconnected lenses: social, technical, economic and ethical. The cocoa value chain will serve as its first case study.

During our visit

It takes approximately an hour and a half to travel from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, to Milagro, one of the country’s main cocoa-producing hubs. On the way, we passed rice paddies and banana plantations before reaching the cocoa fields around Milagro. To get to ASOPROCARGO, the local association of cocoa and agricultural producers where the meeting was held, we crossed a cane bridge over the Río Milagro. These ten seconds of adrenaline were the perfect icebreaker, giving us a chance to start our day in the best mood. The producers welcomed us warmly. Seventeen women and men of different ages, all from nearby cocoa farms, had gathered to meet with us.

With the producers’ consent, we divided into four small groups to start the day. Each table was facilitated by one of us, while we recorded the conversations and took notes and photographs. We invited the farmers to introduce themselves, speak about their farms, their everyday work, and their families. As they shared their experiences, broader issues began to emerge: water and irrigation, climate variations, security, knowledge passed down through generations, access to markets, prices, and many others.

We also held a short “risk network” exercise using colored cards and a flip chart. We asked two simple questions: What concerns you about the future of cocoa farming? And what gives you hope? Their concerns were very concrete, and at the same time difficult to hear. Insecurity and extortion have become so serious that some farmers harvest pods before they are fully ripe, accepting lower quality rather than risking theft. They spoke of drought, disease in the cocoa pods, and the effects of a changing climate. Many also worried that their children might leave for the city or move abroad, not because they do not care about the land, but because they are unsure whether farming can provide them with a future under these circumstances.

Hopes revolved around more formally recognized associations, direct relationships with buyers instead of intermediaries, fair prices and a good quality of living. We also had a conversation about their perceptions about valorizing the cocoa pulp in juices or concentrates and valorizing the cocoa pod into biochar, a stable, carbon-rich soil amendment made by heating organic matter in a chamber deprived of oxygen. Farmers had practical questions about both (e.g., What would this actually take from us? What do get back from it?). Several farmers already had informal experience with these byproducts: some had tried ash from burnt husks and thought they saw stronger pods afterward, others were already making small batches of pulp jelly at home, selling it quietly to neighbors, but never as a business.

Walking around the farms

In addition to the group discussions, we also visited cocoa producers on their farms for bilateral interviews. A highlight for me during the interviews: seeing the variety of crops growing among the cocoa trees: oranges, plantains, papaya, achiote, yuca, and other crops used for household consumption and sold when there is a surplus.

The farm visits also gave us the opportunity to speak with the farmers in a more personal setting. Farmers spoke, for example, about a time not so long ago, when the farms were more open to visitors. Before insecurity became such a constant concern, some had developed small agritourism activities alongside cocoa production: tourists would come to walk through the farms, see the different crops, and learn how cacao is grown and harvested. For some families, this created an additional source of income and a chance to proudly share their knowledge of cacao cultivation directly with tourists. Today, however, many of these activities have become difficult to sustain because of concerns about safety. All in all, the one-to-one interviews allowed us to ask follow-up questions and explore issues that had emerged during the earlier group discussions in greater detail.

What comes next

Some of the technical groundwork behind these two valorization ideas, pulp and pod husk, is laid out in our earlier report, Beyond the Bean. What we heard in Milagro in the group tables and the individual interviews, the risks and hopes mapped out around that flip chart, will now feed directly into our Transdisciplinary Research Platform teaching project, as well as into a new research and innovation project we are shaping around cacao biochar, starting from what farmers themselves experience and value, not only from what the technology can do.

A big thank you to the producers who were generous with their time and honest about both the difficulty and the dignity of their work. If research on circular cocoa is to make a meaningful contribution, it has to begin at the cocoa farm, and not in a university classroom alone. Solutions need to be co-imagined and co-produced. A final thanks also to Producer Plus, our partner NGO, for making these encounters possible, both logistically and administratively.