Today's modern cocoa industry in West and Central Africa is the result of a colonial logic, and is still mired by a series of economic and social injustices. These injustices are easily observed by looking at the distribution of profits throughout the production chain.

The small farmers who work extremely hard to produce the raw material – the cocoa beans – gain a wage or profit that is barely sufficient to survive. The negligible profit they make is immediately invested in the basic necessities of life. Few are those who can invest in land or labor, let alone in modern production technologies. In short, the small farmer is condemnded to remaining a producer and exporter of primary materials only.

Instead, the biggest profits and added values are made by the large agro-industrial corporations who buy up the cocoa seeds at comparatively low prices and transform them into high-value finished products. The men in the middle of the chain – traders, graders, grinders and transporters — are well off too, as they own a large share of the means of production.

Can this situation be changed? Can farmers be organised in such a way that they are no longer condemned to offering their sole manual labor in exchange for a shamefully low wage? The answer is yes. The CocoaMasters are working towards a fair trade system that channels profits into a program which helps the small farmer get out of poverty once and for all. Unlike other fair trade schemes, we refuse to make the farmer dependent on fair trade. Instead, we use the system to make the smallholder self-sufficient, and to give him ownership over an increasingly large share of the means of production of the cocoa industry.