Your gift in action - Oxfam Unwrapped
Congratulations, someone thinks you are so amazing that they have got you an Oxfam Unwrapped gift.
Did you know...
A cocoa pod contains around 40 to 45 cocoa beans. It takes from 135 to 270 cocoa beans to make one pound of chocolate.
Now that you have your gift, we can give the real thing to the people who need it most!
The ideal gift for the chocoholic in your life, bar none - helping a budding cocoa grower to succeed! We'll give them everything from cocoa seeds to tools, training to marketing advice, even help to establish a cocoa-growers’ co-operative so everyone gets more of the benefits. Sweet.
In the border region between Petén, Guatemala and Belize a high percentage of the indigenous Mayan population live in extreme poverty. But thanks to a healthy dose of chocolate, the situation is beginning to change.
Oxfam has provided seeds, tools and training to help local cocoa farmers. In addition to business training, small-scale farmers have also learned about organic growing – techniques which they have also successfully applied to their other fruit crops while they wait for their cocoa trees to mature.
And Oxfam has helped out here too. While cocoa takes up to four years before it begins to generate an income, the community has been trained in grafting techniques that reduce the growth process by 12 months whilst maintaining crop quality. It’s an outcome appreciated by farmers like Juan de Dios Ramirez: “The cocoa farming will increase our income and improve our family’s lives – we will eat better and have better conditions.”
Famers will also have the money to reinvest in tools and seeds for the future, which in Juan’s case is looking bright.
“We have an agreement with a major chocolate company that when our cocoa is ready we will have a five-year deal to supply them with our cocoa. I hope that Oxfam will continue to support us. I still need training so that I can share my knowledge with other communities.”
