From the maker, Marou: Being the first artisan chocolate maker based in Vietnam, and working in close collaboration with farmers, cooperatives and cacao experts, Marou is aiming to make Vietnamese chocolate a widely recognized origin for gourmet chocolate. Because cacao trees like to grow in the shade of larger trees forming a canopy overhead, cacao is ideally suited to growing in areas of reforestation, where biodiversity can be restored, this makes planting cacao more environmentally friendly than similar cash crops that require the clearing of forest.rnUnfortunately the small size of farms here makes the case for going organic quite difficult...[g]iven the cost of organic certification. Local farms average less than 1 hectare of cocoa per farm. So [this] chocolate has no fancy Fair Trade or Organic logos.... But ...it is made by people with a real interest in protecting biodiversity and ensuring that farming families can make a decent living out of their work. ...we buy cacao beans that are fermented and dried by the farmers themselves. This delicate post-harvest work is an important part of the added value from simply growing cocoa trees to being able to sell a high quality bean that is worth more than the bulk market price. ...[W]e know the farmers who sell us cocoa by their first name, we pay them a premium reflecting the extra care given to the post-harvest processing, and when we finish weighing the bags, the money goes directly in their pocket with no intermediaries to pay; we are happy to call such trade fair.
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