Forest Hour Interview with Global Witness on Deforestation in Liberia 

By Liberia Forest Media Watch

On 4 December 2025 Forest Hour, the flagship radio broadcast from Liberia Forest Media Watch (LFMW) had the pleasure of an in-depth interview with Charlie Hammans, a forests investigator at the renowned international anti-corruption and environmental campaign group, Global Witness (GW). The interview focused on the recent GW report on how Europe’s hunger for chocolate is fueling deforestation in Liberia. For those that may have missed the broadcast, here we provide a transcript of that interview. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

LFMW: Thank you for this detailed article. I’ve been going through it and it’s really detailed, well researched. It’s a brilliantly written article, and thank you for that. How did you go about it?

GW: I managed a team of two investigators on the ground: the amazing local journalist we worked with was Paul Kanneh, and also worked with a colleague of mine who used to work at Global Witness, who’s a superb investigator called Colin Robinson. From my desk here in London I carried out, over 30 interviews with all different people along the cocoa supply chain in Liberia. I talked to farmers, to traders, to exporters, to academics. So, you know, even though I didn’t visit, I actually felt that I got a real flavor of Liberia’s personality.

LFMW: In your analysis, you mentioned that Liberia’s cocoa belt lost an area of forest greater than the size of EU country Luxembourg between 2021 to 2024. I mean, how big is the harm that deforestation is causing to Liberia that many people here do not know?

GW: Liberia is incredibly unique in terms of its forests. It is really the last area of intact tropical rainforest in the Upper Guinean rainforest system. So, it is a really, really special country and it’s still, despite a lot of recent deforestation, got high forest cover. And this is absolutely critical for so many reasons.

Firstly, this used to be a very long ecosystem that stretched all the way from Ghana to Guinea. But because of the cocoa industry and mining and palm oil and other sorts of forest risk commodities, the rainforest has been really decimated over the last 50 years or so. And Liberia’s rainforests are vital. They’re a home of endangered species like chimpanzees, for example, and housing very, very important globally significant carbon stores as well in our fight against climate change. I should also say that a huge amount of Liberia’s population still depends on forests and the products you get from the forest for their daily lives, for firewood, for non-forest timber products. So, it’s a vitally important ecosystem.

One other thing that I think is really vital is if you look at other countries like Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, because they have deforested so much of their critical rainforest, they are now really experiencing the strong winds of climate change. So, for example, the cocoa industry has caused the deforestation in those countries, and they are now suffering because the rainforest regulates rainfall. And now in those countries, they are either getting drought or they’re getting extreme floods. And that’s why Liberia’s ecosystem is so special.

LFMW: It’s good that it’s coming from a foreign journalist working with the Global Witness. Most of the time when we sit on our radios here in Liberia and we try to educate the public, most especially the Forest Hour show that you are on right now, many times people sort of doubt, what we say.

And, you know, we don’t get much response from government in terms of making sure that people are held accountable or liable for abusing the forest.

Given your analysis of the data you gathered from Liberia, you mentioned your investigation has revealed that Europe’s hunger for chocolate is helping to drive deforestation in Liberia. Chocolate giants in the world, how are they getting in contact with Liberian cocoa farmers or dealers that is causing this rampant deforestation?

GW: So, the question of global supply chains and chocolate and cocoa supply chains is a fascinating one, because it seems so remote. The link between a huge chocolate giant like Mars or Mondelez that make Dairy Milk, or Hershey’s, for example, in the United States. So, I wanted to highlight in this report that there’s a dual story. In the EU I think we are the biggest per capital consumers of chocolate. But because we don’t have any guarantees of where that chocolate’s come from, in most instances, we could be fueling deforestation in Liberia or anywhere else in the world.

And the interesting thing is that, you know, Liberians are living in real poverty. For them, cocoa is a very important cash crop. And what I didn’t want in this report was to blame Liberian farmers who are in poverty for growing cocoa. What I really want to do is shine accountability on the major companies that have such long, obscure and complicated supply chains, they are fueling it indirectly.

So, we traced from farm all the way up to the chocolate companies is this incredibly difficult system. We found that cocoa farmers have very small plots that were deforested in the last few years. They’ve been selling cocoa beans to these middlemen, and these middlemen, they go and sell it to really whoever, but they mainly sell it to the exporters in Monrovia. And because the middlemen and the exporters buy so much cocoa, it really could come from absolutely anywhere in the country. And there doesn’t exist a system to stop deforestation cocoa flowing into Europe at the moment. These traders buy huge amounts of cocoa from everywhere in the world.

Liberia is still a relatively small producer of cocoa, although our research did find that the exports seem to have really boomed in the last few years. But then in Europe, this is bulk bought by big European traders, and they buy it from everywhere. So, they may be buying from South America, be buying from Cote d’Ivoire, from Ghana, from Liberia, from all over. And then what we found is this obscure system called ‘mass balance’ that allows the deforestation linked cocoa from Liberia to be mixed with clean cocoa or deforestation free cocoa from other countries, and then still sold to European consumers as sustainable.

So, unwittingly, UK and EU consumers are buying chocolate but they don’t know that it could be linked all the way back to a farm that cleared Liberia’s forest. So it is absolutely vital that these traders start to invest in traceability in Liberia.

Although it has been probably been going to be delayed for another year, we are seeing the introduction of a law in Europe that is going to require any chocolate that is sold in the European market to be linked all the way back to the farm the cocoa beans were produced on, and that would really help Liberia generate a sustainable industry. But at the moment, the traders are just buying in bulk from the exporters, regardless of where it came from and mixing it with other cocoa sources.

LFMW: The EUDR – European Union Deforestation Regulation – is one topic we’ve discussed on the Forest Hour show, and we’ve shared with the public about what the EU intends to do regarding the issue of deforestation. Products from deforested land should not be sold, or should not enter the European market. But, is it that the EU could inadvertently be consuming chocolate produced from cocoa harvested from deforested land in Liberia? From your analytical standpoint, what could be done? Because this this appears to be a menace in Liberia today.

GW: Absolutely, I think that really gets to the nub of the question and the issue between Europe and countries like Liberia. Some of the traders that we found have been buying from Liberia for years and now dropping Liberia as a supply country. And they’re not ordering any more cocoa beans, because now they’re worried that under the European law, they may be found to be accountable for putting deforestation linked products on the market, because ultimately, at the current stage it’s not fully traceable all the way back to source.

We are talking about some chocolate companies and some traders that make billions in revenues and profits every year. One example I use in the report is Mondelez, which is one of the largest food companies in the world. Their chocolate division alone, in the last year that reports are available, actually made something like 11 billion dollars from all of their chocolate sales worldwide. That’s more than twice the entire GDP of Liberia. So we have a real equity issue here. In Europe, we’re asking countries like Liberia to produce raw material for our chocolate, but we’re not supporting Liberia and other countries to actually develop a sustainable system.

What we found is that in countries like Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, they’ve learned the lessons too late. Some of the chocolate companies for those countries, which are the major ones, together they account for about 60% of all the world’s cocoa supply, they are now investing in traceability in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. But with the EUDR the risk is that Liberia just gets dropped completely, the country. The traders and the chocolatiers need to acknowledge that they’ve sourced from Liberia, both directly and indirectly for a long time. And they need to actually support the Liberian government and the exporters to develop extensive traceability systems. There’s been some really good research that shows the cost of compliance with the EUDR can only be as little as 0.1% of a major company’s revenues. That’s a really small amount when we’re talking about billions in profits.

And they could help Liberia to have a fully traceable supply chain system that meant only sustainable cocoa got to the market and rewarded the farmers in Liberia that are choosing not to cut down areas of forest, but instead they grow in agroforestry and grow in tandem with the forest. One of the biggest tragedies in this report is that actually cocoa flourishes very well in agroforestry systems, which is a system where you keep the forest standing and you use the shade of the forest to grow your cocoa.

But it’s also a crisis of poverty. I think a Liberian farmer will like to clear land because it allows them to grow rice. And the cocoa is often intercropped a bit as an investment to be able to sell as a cash crop in a few years’ time while they’re also producing cassava or rice for them and their families. Really the nub of the problem is for the traders and the chocolatiers to pay fair prices for the products and also to support the Liberian government and the exporters and the farmers to develop sustainable practices.

LFMW: Thank you. Your report indicated that not a single Liberian cocoa farm has received certification on the Rainforest Alliance’s scheme. What does it mean?

GW: Yes. So, Rainforest Alliance, for your listeners that are not aware, is a system of certification that is used on almost every chocolate product sold in Europe. And if you buy a chocolate bar in Europe, it will almost always have the Rainforest Alliance seal on it, which is a little frog. And there are two kinds of certifications for Rainforest Alliance. There’s the supply chain, and then there’s also the farm.

So, to be certified in Liberia you need to have a commitment to sustainable agricultural practices. You need to have not deforested since 2014, which I believe is the cutoff date. But the real thing is, certification for farmers is incredibly expensive. And for farmers living in really difficult situations certification is just not going to be an option. In Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire there are very large cooperatives that band together and they use their money to get certification. The cooperatives in Liberia that our reporters talk to and I talk to from London, while they’re expanding, they’re not as mature as in those countries. They’re not as well set up.

So, I think until that happens, there’s not going to be widespread certification in Liberia. But with the question about the EUDR we’ve really moved beyond the certification question. What we really need is the whole country, not just individual isolated examples, but the whole country to be creating deforestation-free cocoa. Referring to my last point, that’s exactly where the major EU companies, traders and chocolate companies need to work with the government to set up that system. So, every bean sold outside of Liberia or even inside it can be completely traceable and you can use the system to work out exactly where those beans have come from and which farmer. And that also allows you to run an analysis where you can work out whether there’s been deforestation there in the last few years. So, I really think traceability is really the heart of the sustainability question in the cocoa industry.

LFMW: From your analysis, do you sense some level of ignorance on the part of the locals that are involved in cocoa farming that they do not understand certain things regarding what they should do, what they should not do to ensure that their cocoa is not denied entry into the EU market?

GW: Yeah, there’s been some amazing work. I know IFAD have done some great work. I think our investigators met some cooperatives and individuals in Nimba County who had been trained and they’re very keen on using these agroforestry methods that I mentioned earlier. I really think there is a possibility of sustainability in cocoa in the next few years. And I don’t think it’s a question of ignorance on the part of the farmers. I don’t think there is a role for me as a Western journalist or UK journalist to victimise the, as I’ve said, farmers that are living in and own a piece of land. They may not be a wealthy family. They may be growing a high price of cocoa at the moment, which is a huge push factor for why so many people in Liberia are planting cocoa. We just need to be really clear.

I think the responsibility is on the traders and also the exporters. Lots of the exporters that I talked to and we interviewed are Lebanese in the capital of Monrovia, some are Liberian as well. And I think there was a limited understanding about traceability. Some, like Aya Group for example, claim to have mapped over 20,000 farms already. Other groups as well have begun their process of starting to map their direct supply chain. Now, this is really brilliant, and one cocoa campaigner that I interviewed said we’ve seen more progress in the last two years on traceability and sustainability in cocoa than in the last 20 because of the EUDR is actually driving exporters. They say, “well, hang on, if I don’t have a fully traceable supply chain, I’m not going to be able to sell to Europe”. But we did also find that some exporters were quite confused because they were still buying large quantities of cocoa through middlemen.

And with middlemen, you lose that traceability. You know, it could really have been from anywhere because the middlemen we talked to, they say, “oh, yes, we buy from any farm. It doesn’t matter”. Their priority is to keep the cocoa flowing. So, I really think that shows that the exporters are making efforts, and that’s really encouraging.

I don’t think that would have happened without the EUDR. However, there’s still a huge amount of work to do. But as I said before, I really think the traders that have sourced millions of kilograms of cocoa and made a lot of revenue out of buying Liberian cocoa, they should be the ones that step in and help and pay for that system.  

LFMW: To summarize all of the issues you highlighted in this article, where do you think the actual problem lies, in the issue of cocoa harvested and exported from deforested land in Liberia?  

GW: I think it’s a question at the moment of economic incentives, both from the part of the farmer all the way up to the chocolate makers. There is currently no incentive for a Liberian farmer to not deforest. We’ve got the EUDR, but that’s just risked being delayed for another year, which means another year of deforestation in Liberia for cocoa. So, all the way up to the chocolate company, there is currently no rule, no law that stops them buying mass-balanced cocoa. That’s the cocoa I talked about before, which is the deforestation cocoa mixed in with the clean deforestation-free cocoa, and selling it to their consumers.

At the moment, there exists no incentive or way of stopping that. And the middlemen in Liberia, a country where I don’t think we should be judging it by the same standards as Côte d’Ivoire or Ghana where the cocoa industry is a lot more mature, Liberia is the country where informality is an important part of the trade. But my point is, until those incentives change, there’s still going to be deforestation for cocoa. And I’ll talk a little bit about Silas Siakor, who I interviewed for this piece, and he’s using a really, really interesting alternative.

He’s got some support from the Irish government to roll out a programme that, instead of the farmers planting cocoa, as a community they come together and they agree to protect their lands and monitor their lands and make sure there isn’t deforestation, but they get paid a decent amount for doing so. That suggests that we are going to be able to still have good livelihoods and have development without destroying our natural resources. I think it’s absolutely vital that the chocolate industry wakes up to this problem in Liberia, because we have to learn the lessons from history.

I studied history at university, and I always have a historical perspective when I look at these things. We don’t want to wake up in 20 years and Liberia’s forest is gone because of mass planting for cocoa. It’s very worrying. And on the border, the Ivorian NGO IDEF, who I’m sure you might have interviewed before, they’ve done great work on exposing how Burkina Faso and Ivorian’s farmers are moving into new areas of Grand Gedeh and are really causing high levels of deforestation for big, large plantations rather than the small farms that the Liberian farmers traditionally have. There’s a real worry there. And I think the Liberian government has to wake up to this. But also, as I’ve said, and I’ll say it again, they need to be supported.

It’s not morally right that these million, billion-dollar companies in Europe profit from Liberia’s cocoa and hard work, but also don’t pay in so it has a sustainable future. And the EU also has a lot of work to do as well. This law, which I fully support, is going to slow down deforestation and we need it now. But if they’re bringing it in you need a bit of carrot as well as stick. The EU needs to set up programs to help Liberia support traceability because it’s unlikely the government is going to be able to do it by itself. It’s quite complicated to do.

LFMW: Charlie, I want to take leave of you, but let me ask you my last question before you conclude with some vital points that you may want to make here. What lessons can Liberia learn from Guinea, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana as far as forest preservation or conservation is concerned?

GW: Well, of course, they prioritized mass planting of cocoa. All of the Upper Guinean rainforest area has excellent conditions for growing cocoa. But if you grow too much and you deforest and you get greedy, then you end up with no forest, no natural resources. You know, in Cote d’Ivoire – the largest cocoa producing country in the world – outside of protected areas they have almost no forest. There’s one study that says they’ve lost 70 or 80 percent of their forests, mainly through cocoa farming in the last 30, 40, 50 years.

So, the lesson for Liberia to learn is there’s a huge opportunity, but the government, the EU, cocoa companies, chocolate companies in Europe and the US and other areas in the Global North, they need to create the incentives to provide the support to Liberia. There’s an interesting initiative that has come out of the last COP in Brazil, which is the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, the TFFF, as it’s called, which is going to provide direct payments to governments based on a low level of deforestation.

So, there’s also a good incentive for Liberia’s government to sort out the deforestation crisis in Liberia because it could be paid for every hectare preserved. And a lot of that money is also going to go to indigenous peoples, which is really promising. Sadly, I think a lot of Liberian cocoa farmers and the cocoa industry look at Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire and say, that’s the model we want.

I think you have to proceed with caution because now their cocoa industries are facing real challenges. And, ironically, the massive spike in cocoa prices was because of the droughts in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. So, Liberia has to learn those lessons and build a sustainable agroforestry, community-based cocoa sector, and also look at alternatives like the programme I mentioned for forests, where we can actually directly pay communities to protect and maintain.

LFMW: Thank you so much, Charlie.

Charlie Hammans accepted to speak to us on the Forest Hour, and it’s good that we have him. He’s provided so much information to Liberia. In fact, shared his own insights: sitting down and writing this report analysing Liberia’s problems regarding the cocoa industry and how middlemen and other challenges that the country is facing right now as a result of this huge investment in cocoa from chocolate giants around the world. But Charlie, how would you like to close? What final thing would you like to say before we end the interview?

GW: Matthias, I just want to really thank you for your amazing questions and for your interest in the report and all the brilliant work that you’re doing with the Forest Hour show to bring forest news to the people of Liberia. For me, it’s an absolute pleasure to talk to people in Liberia. I found it to be the most enterprising and fantastic people to talk to all across the supply chain. So, a huge thanks to you. And really, I hope that your Forest Hour work continues really strongly.