Early in 2012, Barry Parkin found himself giving a speech on global cocoa productivity. After 28 years at the US confectionary giant Mars, Parkin knows a thing or two about the subject. And his verdict wasn't rosy.

"You know, we've all been working on this to a greater or lesser extent for decades," he told the industry audience. That much is true. Mars and its ilk are packed with lab-coated PhD students modelling climatic conditions and testing soil types. While the yields of most agricultural commodities have shot up over the past half-century, however, the so-called green revolution has somehow passed cocoa farmers by.

To ram home the point, Parkin put up a slide depicting long-term cocoa productivity. Yield rates read like a flatline on a heart monitor. Today, most cocoa farmers produce half a tonne per hectare, much as they did 80 years ago. Poor farm management, lack of long-term investment and low prices bedevil the industry. Among the more deleterious outcomes of such realities are farmer poverty and child labour.

Parkin's frank assessment set him up for issuing the conference attendees with a powerful take-home message. "Collectively, we have made no difference," he said from the conference podium. "And that's just unacceptable. We have to do better."

Aligning interests

For Parkin, now Mars's chief sustainability officer, the path ahead revolves around a single word: alignment. The cocoa fields of Africa, east Asia and Latin America are dotted with isolated pilot programmes. While welcome, he believes that such efforts lack the scale required to get the world's cocoa growers back on their feet. "We would make much, much faster progress if we got aligned at an industry level," he argues.

It makes sense that Mars should start by aligning sustainability efforts in its own operations. That process kicked off about five years ago when Parkin (then global head of chocolate procurement and sustainability) spearheaded an internal drive to prioritise the economic sustainability of cocoa farming.

Winning the buy-in of the board, which remains dominated by members of the Mars family, wasn't too difficult, he says. The facts spoke for themselves. If action wasn't taken, the chocolate industry was likely to be staring down the barrel of a one-million-tonne shortage of cocoa come 2020. In response, Mars announced the launch of the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative in 2009. The budget for the global programme, which focuses on cocoa research, technology transfer and sustainable certification, is about $30m (£18.5m) a year.

Persuading others in the industry to collaborate should, on paper, be easy too. The threat of supply shortage still very much stands. "Even if you don't care about the planet and people, this is a business issue," states Parkin. Anyone wanting an illustration of a precompetitive sustainability issue has an exemplary case in the world's perennially poor cocoa harvests, he continues.

Even so, companies' competitive instincts run deep and partnership approaches come hard. If Mars was to win over its peers, it had to prove its good intentions, Parkin explains. The company's two-year programme to sequence the cocoa genome gave it just such an opportunity. As soon as the results came in, the family-owned confectioner shared them publicly, he explains. "That sort of gesture I think went a long way to show that we were serious about this being precompetitive."

Parkin's alignment vision extends beyond the cocoa industry itself. First off, governments in cocoa-producing countries are "critical partners", he says. Without them on board, industry efforts will be inevitably stymied. The same goes for charities and development organisations. In all cases, Parkin sees transparency as essential to gaining trust. Famed for its "pretty private approach", Mars recently embarked on a "deliberate strategy to be more open". As part of that commitment, it started issuing annual sustainability reports three years ago – all of which are candid about Mars's struggles as well as its progress, Parkin maintains.

Fixing misalignments

Alignment is a tricky task. No collective strategy for promoting cocoa productivity has so far emerged, for instance. Consensus building takes time, for sure. And the more organisations involved, the more viewpoints around the table need squaring off. In addition, Park says the lack of collaborative examples from other agricultural sectors is slowing progress as well: "There's a lot of talk about this [working together], but most of that talk is about how difficult it is." On the flip side, he sees the seeds of an opportunity too: "If cocoa can do this, then I think it shows a model for other industries."

Getting an industry aligned behind a sector is even trickier when the link between sustainability and the business bottom-line isn't obvious. Take dairy production. Mars is under pressure to cut the carbon emissions related to the milk it buys. It's hard to sell this as an "efficiency play or scarcity play", according to Parkin. "There are some things where it is harder to find the alignment," he concedes. "It doesn't mean that we aren't going to do them, but it's harder to get people quickly engaged."

Not that Mars's chief sustainability officer is going to give up any time soon. He sees himself sticking in his current role until he retires. "These are generational issues and we'll ultimately be judged in 2030 or 2040 as to whether we made a difference."