The FLA annually conducts independent assessments of a sample of each affiliated company’s supply chain. For Olam, the FLA has been monitoring since 2014 a portion of the cocoa-producing cooperatives and farms in its Ivory Coast supply chain. In 2015, Olam reported it had traced 100 percent of the cooperatives supplying cocoa for Olam in the Ivory Coast, which represents 117 cooperatives and about 53,000 farmers. Cocoa sourced from cooperatives represents 100 percent of the entire supply chain.
In 2015, the FLA conducted Independent External Monitoring (IEM) visits in three cooperatives that had never been assessed before. The below report summarizes the FLA’s findings for its 2015 assessments, the company’s responses to the 2015 findings, and the progress and remaining gaps in remediation of issues found during previous assessments in 2014.
The FLA’s key findings in its 2015 assessments compared to 2014 findings show progress in areas such as child labor awareness among farmers and the development of farm-level labor policies. There is a continued need for progress in other areas like overall code and grievance procedure awareness among farmers, workers, and family members, lack of first-aid kits in 88 percent of the visited communities and lack of a health center in 68 percent of communities, lack of access and use of personal protective equipment (PPE), lack of age verification system leading to the involvement of children in hazardous work, and lack of payment records for both the farmer’s certification premiums and payment made to workers.