Sustainable cocoa: from deforestation to reforestation

The Cocoa4Future project (formally titled "Sustainable cocoa: from deforestation to reforestation") is a €6 million intervention operating in Côte d'Ivoire under the DESIRA programme, managed by the European Commission's DG INTPA. According to EU financial records in the IATI datastore, the project has been active since February 2020 and runs to January 2026, with €5 million of the €6 million committed amount confirmed as disbursed. This is a meaningful signal of financial execution: a disbursement rate of roughly 83 percent against a commitment that is now essentially at term suggests the project has progressed substantially beyond a purely pledged status, though disbursement of funds to an implementing partner does not, in itself, confirm delivery of outcomes on the ground. It should be noted that this project is categorised under the "Energy" pillar in the Global Gateway tracker, which appears to be a miscategorisation. The project's actual scope, covering forest governance, reforestation in classified and rural forests, and agroforestry support to cocoa farmers, sits squarely within the agriculture, land use, and environment domain. Readers should treat the pillar designation with caution. The broader operating environment for this project is difficult. Reuters reporting from July 2023 found that after five years of industry and donor efforts, a credible formula for eliminating deforestation from cocoa supply chains in West Africa remains elusive. A separate Reuters article from October 2023 reported that the EU itself warned Côte d'Ivoire to accelerate its compliance with incoming EU deforestation regulation (EUDR), signalling that the country's progress on forest governance, a core component of this project, remained insufficient by the EU's own reckoning at that point.