11.05.2017
Sustainable Cocoa Forum: Keynote speech by Dr Christiane Hellar
In a keynote speech at the start of the General Assembly of the Forum for Sustainable Cocoa, Dr Christiane Hellar presented the recently published era-paper on cocoa by the Hamburger Stiftung für Wirtschaftsethik. In her presentation, she focused on the question of how collective action initiatives could better realise their potential in future.
According to Dr Hellar, the aim of a well-established and recognised multi-stakeholder initiative such as the Sustainable Cocoa Forum must be to actively seek critical discourse, despite all the agreement regarding the overarching goal. Civil society and standard-setting organisations, in particular, always face the major challenge in collective action initiatives of, on the one hand, living up to their responsibilities and fulfilling their critical role, and, on the other hand, demonstrating a high degree of willingness to cooperate. Dr Hellar also called on industry, the retail sector and government representatives to reflect on their own interests and make them transparent. This, he said, would enable the various strategies and approaches to be negotiated even more effectively within the framework of joint activities.
Following the keynote speech, representatives of the various stakeholder groups engaged in a critical discussion of the ideas presented and took up the arguments in a number of presentations on the second day of the event. The dominant themes of the general meeting were human rights and children’s rights, as this ethical risk – despite all efforts – remains only inadequately addressed.
The Hamburger Stiftung für Wirtschaftsethik has been a member of the Forum for Sustainable Cocoa since 2015 and published the results of its Ethical Risk Assessment in its ‘era-paper Cocoa’ in March this year.