Forests are a critical part of the natural ecosystem and help mitigate climate risks, improve climate change resiliency, safeguards biodiversity and can provide livelihoods and economic opportunities for forest-based communities and Indigenous Peoples. However, deforestation, ecosystem conversion and encroachment linked to agricultural supply chains continue to be major global challenges with broad and far-reaching implications for generations to come. From cocoa to pulp and paper and palm oil, supply chains around the world are facing challenges stemming from complex root causes, including poverty, limited knowledge of sustainable farming practices and poor law enforcement.
Hershey commits to eliminating commodity-driven deforestation from our entire supply chain by 2030 while respecting and protecting the human rights of individuals. Guided by our No Deforestation Policy, we will work within our individual commodity supply chains to drive sustainable practices with our suppliers and within the industry to achieve this.
Through complementary policies, commitments and certification programs, we have crafted approaches relevant to specific raw materials that we source, including a No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) commitment for palm oil and full traceability for pulp and paper and palm oil.
We are also working with partners like Sourcemap and Earthworm Foundation to accelerate monitoring and verification along supply chains to map and monitor forest areas around our cocoa and palm suppliers.
Read more about this commodity-specific approach to ending deforestation.
In our cocoa growing communities, deforestation is fueled by complex regional issues such as lack of access to land and land titling. We have developed several key partnerships, including with local governments, to address these unique challenges
We have spent the past few years comprehensively mapping our cocoa growing farms in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to create a baseline deforestation rate through measuring annual tree cover loss and to closely monitor farm locations for encroachment into protected forest areas.
Without proper land titles, it is difficult for farmers to access financing or make necessary changes on their farms to prevent deforestation, promote reforestation, and apply agroforestry and climate-smart cocoa farming techniques.
Through our partnership with the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) Project (2018–2021), we support communities in Ghana to clarify and document land rights as well as improve land-use planning practices through agroforestry.
We continued our Kakum Agroforestry Landscape Program partnership in Ghana, which covers an area equivalent to twenty times the size of Manhattan. This partnership promotes and supports community-led landscape management, spreads climate smart cocoa-growing practices and provides training for extra income-generating activities.