Preventing a Chocolate Drought

Shayna Harris MBA ’11 is fighting to make chocolate sustainable. In a recent BusinessWeek article, she described a looming shortage of cocoa by 2020 if farming methods do not change. While the demand for chocolate grows, cocoa farmers are among the poorest in the world and neither governments nor agribusiness have invested in improving productivity. With a background in sustainable agriculture, she is throwing her Sloan management skills into helping farmers in remote areas of West Africa and Southeast Asia improve their odds of success.

Before attending Sloan, Harris served as Oxfam America’s coffee program officer, developing a global ethical trade campaign in US, East Africa, and Central America. She spent her Fulbright fellowship year studying the impact of market access and agro-ecology programs for small-scale farmers in Brazil. While at Sloan, she co-founded the MIT Food and Agriculture Collaborative while she studied sustainability in agricultural value chains.

Harris’s current job as cocoa sustainability manager for Mars Global Chocolate puts her on the front lines of the battle for sustainability—with corporate assets. She choose to work for Mars after graduation because “I was impressed at the public commitments that Mars had made to sustainability and that the sustainability work is embedded in the operations of the company.” Although she’s officially in procurement, she works with the company’s research scientists and policy experts to support a long-term supply of cocoa—and help farmers in the process.

One project offers improved planting materials, fertilizers, and training aimed at boosting the yield per hectare. “We are establishing networks of rural entrepreneurs who can lead cocoa plant rehabilitation in remote cocoa growing regions. Rehabilitation, which involves using a branch, or budwood, of a new tree to restore an old one, produces more fruitful trees,” Harris told BusinessWeek. “In Indonesia and West Africa, this kind of support can help farmers triple their yields.”

Another plus of her current job is working with fellow MIT alumni. “I work with Sourcemap, an MIT Media Lab start up, to map our impact in cocoa and monitor our programs globally," Harris says. "They are building us a custom tool that allows us to monitor the rollout of our programs in real time, meaning that our truly global team can stay connected and know what’s going on in different parts of the world.”