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Strong need to improve cocoa governance

There is a vivid and ongoing debate on different strategies for improving the position of cocoa smallholders in West Africa. Several studies focussed on opportunities for poverty reduction in the cocoa sector, looking at the role of land tenancy, the impact of fair trade, the opportunities for living wages and the importance of institutional and market reforms. All studies seem to agree on the idea that there is ‘no one size fits all’ solution, but they tend to disagree on the priorities and pathways for implementing a combined set of measures for improving farmers livelihoods. In essence, this is due to their reliance on partial approaches and the rather limited use of systems transformation thinking.