Wisdom of Traders Sometimes it takes 50 yeas of experience in an industry to have the wisdom and courage to speak the truth. Derek Chambers, a semi-retired cocoa trader, had good words of advice at this week’s Cocoa Merchants Association of America conference in Miami. He advised delegates to stop wasting money by paying nongovernmental groups for ineffective sustainability and fair-trade certification schemes. Chambers argued that the cocoa industry is “not responsible for low cocoa prices, poverty, child labor and deforestation…and…cocoa farmers are not poor because they grow cocoa, they grow cocoa because they are poor.” Instead, he argues poor governance is to blame and everyone would be better off if t...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.