The International Cocoa Initiative has joined the German Initiative on Sustainable Cocoa (GISCO) as a supporting member, enabling it to take an active part in a number of working groups within the platform.
GISCO is a multi-stakeholder initiative of the German Federal Government, the German sweets and confectionery industry, the German retail grocery trade and civil society, and currently has around 70 members. Through its participation in GISCO, ICI aims to engage with key stakeholders in Germany, including German cocoa and chocolate companies, in addition to key government and civil society stakeholders.
“This is an important platform for us to engage with, in addition to the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa that we are already a member of, and will help us to advance the technical advocacy objectives defined in our new strategy, whilst also strengthening alignment in the sector,” explained ICI Executive Director Nick Weatherill.
“European Member States are playing a key role in shaping the evolving European human rights due diligence discourse, so being involved in these discussions at the member state level will be an important part of ensuring that new emerging regulation supports the upscaling of actions that are effective in the fight against child labour,” he added.
“We are very happy to welcome ICI as a new supporting member at GISCO. This will further strengthen our multi-stakeholder initiative and contribute to our overall goal of a sustainable cocoa sector. We are convinced that ICI’s supporting membership will create an important contribution to a broader and sustainable exchange at national and also European level, on how to reach our objective to eliminate child labor from cocoa production”, said Wolf Kropp-Büttner, Chairman of the German Initiative on Sustainable Cocoa.
ICI is particularly looking forward to exchanging with other GISCO members on good practice in the sustainability working group which discusses issues related to child labour among others, the human rights due diligence working group, in addition to the international working group on traceability, which brings together representatives from the other European and Swiss initiatives on sustainable cocoa.