Cocoa Verification Board - Willy Wonka Cares

The Cocoa Verification Board is a multi-stakeholder body created to validate government surveys of labor in cocoa production. It is both unique and promising. Its sponsor, Verité, says (12/21/07) that the Board “will select, train and hire individual, independent verifiers who will analyze critique and report on the robustness of the national surveys undertaken by the governments of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire… to identify and remediate the worst forms of child labor and forced adult labor in the cocoa sector.”
Verité has announced that all materials relating to its own work and that of the Verification Board will be readily available to all interested parties and a website will be created to ensure that information is easily accessible and widely available.
Verification Board members are: (1) NGOs: Dr. Stephen Ayidiya, University of Ghana, Legon, Alice Koiho Kipre, Afrique Secours et Assistance, Côte d'Ivoire, Andrews Addoquaye Tagoe, General Agricultural Workers' Union, Diane Mull, International Initiative on Exploitive Child Labor, John Trew, CARE International, (2) Government: Tony Fofie, Ghana Cocoa Board, Amouan Assouan Acquah, Special Counselor to the Prime Minister, Côte d'Ivoire, (3) Industry: Jeff Morgan, Mars, Inc., Isabelle Adam, European Cocoa Association.

Comment: This is a good step forward for a luxury-good industry that has for decades had enlightened leaders. In England it was the progressive Quakers - the Rowntrees in York (an inspiration for Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, their firm was purchased by the at times anti-CSR Nestlé group in 1988), and the utopian Cadbury Family in Birmingham. In the United States it was the Mennonite utopian Milton Hershey, whose factory in Hershey, Pa. was for many years a dedicated citizen and employer, and founder of a model orphanage and school; the company was reportedly acquired amidst controversy by the white knight of the buyers, Cadbury-Schweppes.
Another U.S. company, Mars, has a similar record of financial success as the other three companies but was not historically in the same CSR league, perhaps partly because it moved around, starting in Tacoma, Wash., moving to Minneapolis, Minn., then Chicago, Ill., while expanding to Slough, England and Newark, NJ.

The main question I have about the new Board is about how much it has bitten off. On the basis of how it describes itself, the Cocoa Verification Board is a multi-stakeholder body and process, a concept with a fine pedigree.
The question in my mind is how far one can go with second-party auditing, i.e., verification of nonfinancial activities without the guidance of an independent set of standards or the oversight of an accreditation body. Second-party audits evolve based on feedback and need. As the first auditor of the Ben & Jerry's CSR multi-stakeholder report for 1988 - the first stakeholder report on record, and independently audited to boot - I am familiar with the concept and also with the challenge (20 years ago!) of trying to carry out several oversight functions at the same time.
The Cocoa Verification Board and its sponsor, Verité, are pioneering new approaches to second-party verification. They both have the character of an industry association, sharing some of the attributes of associations created by the processing and retailing end of an industry, like the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices, to improve working conditions at the source of their raw materials. The Board and sponsor are good examples of the best of second-party auditing and certification and in dealing with two sovereign West African governments they have the clout of the chocolate-buying brands behind them. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works.

The other route, which I have come to prefer as more methodical and easier to manage, is to create a separate standard-setting body and an accreditation body that will train and eventually accredit individuals or organizations to serve as certification bodies. The number and size of certification bodies have been growing (see examples in India) and are accumulating cross-company and cross-standard experience and skills that have a regional focus.
Best practices for both second-party and third-party audits have been evolving, especially over the last ten years, in the direction of specifying the function of each function in the process to preserve the integrity of the multi-stakeholder verification process. The interested reader is referred to ISO (national accreditation) and the ISEAL Alliance (global accreditation) for more information on the current status of third-party audit practices. Both ISO and ISEAL members have a history going back decades of working with raising standards, including labor standards, in private-sector agriculture.
Could a globally accredited certification body audit a government agency? That will be the big test. At the moment governments appoint accreditation bodies that examine state universities, hospitals and labs. An open question is how far governments would be willing to go to submit themselves to third-party verification. Experiments are under way now in which third-party accreditation and certification bodies are working with NGOs providing adoption services. If these experiments continue to have a positive outcome, government agencies could follow the same path.
So the Cocoa Verification Board is both unique and promising as one of the best examples of second-party auditing. It has taken on a lot.