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bombastic element

Saturday, July 16, 2011

 

 

 

 

West Africa: Politics of Chocolate

 

Over at the Dublin Review of Books, David Ralph’s penetrating review of former Reuters West Africa correspondent Órla Ryan’s Bean To Bar – West Africa and the Politics of Chocolate. Ryan, among other things, explains the cocoa roots of the recent political siege in Cote d’Ivoire. But we found two excerpts that double as commentary for 2 recent videos about cocoa posted online. 

Ryan explains how West Africa is barely mentioned when you take the tour of the Cadbury museum in Bournville, England, even though two thirds of the cocoa in the company’s chocolates come from West Africa:

Every day thousands of Britons and international visitors arrive to visit the small town where, [the Cadbury World, a themed museum] tour explains, in the late 1870s the Cadbury brothers began experimenting with strange, small brown beans in their shop’s tea rooms…. The story of chocolate told here is a pleasing one. But there is one glaring omission. The cocoa beans packed into the familiar brands within easy reach in every Spar shop and supermarket aisle do not come from South American jungles. More than two-thirds of global cocoa production comes from West Africa, with Ghana and Ivory Coast the world’s two biggest producers. And yet this corner of the world gets scarcely a mention from Cadbury – a company whose entire bean supply now comes almost exclusively from the two West African cocoa-producing nations.

Above, a German educational film shot in 1947 showing Ghanaian boatmen ferrying cargoes of cocoa out to sea and loading them unto a Dutch ship off the Holland West Afrika Lijn (H/T: Michael Rogge). Below, cue to 5:36 of the PBS report broadcast back in June on the economic future of Ghana. It mentions the inequality in cocoa trade with the West and one solution in the guise of Ghanaian cocoa co-ops like Kuapa selling to Fairtrade companies…

Ryan on the other hand argues that such Fairtrade narratives hide the far more complex cocoa reality on the ground facing the Kuapa co-operative:

Ryan is not satisfied with the simple story told by the celebrity backers. Visiting farmers on the ground, she discovered a muddier reality, as she arrived in cocoa villages at the height of the selling season in mid-September. She was surprised to find that, despite the premium paid by Kuapa, farmers sold beans to other buyers – buyers who did not explicitly invest in their communities. So why, asked Ryan, would farmers choose to sell to such buyers? And the 
answer, it seems, is a complex one. “Several factors influence the farmers’ choice of buyer,” Ryan observes. “He may be indebted to one particular buyer and be obliged to give him his beans. He may choose to sell his cocoa to two or three buyers, spreading the risk that one may default on payment. His choice of buyer may also depend on who its agent is. He may be a relative or a friend. He may trust one more than another, the decision can be a personal as much as a financial one.” Besides, cash is king: like other buyers, Kuapa experiences cash flow problems, and may not always have ready cash to pay farmers for beans during the selling season. So whoever turns up with cash on the day will usually secure the beans. And in the rush to secure a share of the harvest every September, it can be difficult for Kuapa to have its voice heard at market. In one small village alone, Ryan met twenty-five buyers all competing for farmers’ cocoa. She concludes: “It is little wonder that, for all of Kuapa’s efforts, I met farmers who said they didn’t see much difference between it and other buyers.” But Fairtrade companies like Divine gloss over the nuanced trading games between farmers and buyers in the bush. To try and explain all this would, as Ryan observes, confuse the consumer message. As long as consumers in the West remain happy to pay the premium on ethically traded goods, then Fairtrade companies will continue to airbrush the complex reality of life for cocoa farmers in remote Ghanaian villages. “It seems clear that, whatever Chris Martin says, it will not make that big a difference to the farmer which bar of chocolate [the consumer] picks up.”

 

__________________________

 

Dublin Review of Books

Issue 58, June 16th, 2014

 

 

 

FROM BEAN TO BAR

By David Ralph

Ryan - chocolate nations

Chocolate nations: Living and dying for cocoa in West Africa, by Órla Ryan, 182 pp, €16.35, Zed Books, ISBN: 978-1848130050

 

In the centre of the small town of Bournville in the English Midlands stands Cadbury World, a themed museum built by one of Britain’s most instantly recognisable companies. It is here, says the advertising copy, that visitors can get behind the famous cursive scrawl of the logo and discover where “chocolate comes to life”.

 

Every day thousands of Britons and international visitors arrive to visit the small town where, the tour explains, in the late 1870s the Cadbury brothers began experimenting with strange, small brown beans in their shop’s tea rooms. By 1879, in a small factory on the spot occupied by Cadbury World today, the brothers were making the first bars of what we now know as milk chocolate.

 

The tour swerves into a room resounding with the squawks of exotic birds and the gush of an indoor waterfall, recreating the effects of a South American jungle. Mock cocoa trees line the path and visitors learn that it is from these trees that cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, originates. Sixteenth century European explorers are credited with introducing the cocoa bean to Europe. From here the tour fast-forwards four hundred years, and the visitors are back in a modern factory, where an endless stream of packaged Dairy Milks, Cream Eggs, Fruit and Nuts and Crunchies whirrs past on a conveyor belt. Guests stuff themselves with complimentary bars, and the exhibition ends with a screening of some of Cadbury’s growing archive of television ads.

 

The story of chocolate told here is a pleasing one. But there is one glaring omission. The cocoa beans packed into the familiar brands within easy reach in every Spar shop and supermarket aisle do not come from South American jungles. More than two-thirds of global cocoa production comes from West Africa, with Ghana and Ivory Coast the world’s two biggest producers. And yet this corner of the world gets scarcely a mention from Cadbury – a company whose entire bean supply now comes almost exclusively from the two West African cocoa-producing nations.

 

One guest to Cadbury World who was startled by this omission was Irish journalist Órla Ryan. Prior to her visit to Bournville, Ryan had covered the commodities market for the news agency Reuters in London. Her job there involved speaking with investors about market conditions and analysing cocoa investment figures to write daily business reports for the Reuters wire service. But it was only in 2005, when Reuters posted Ryan as its West African correspondent to cover the region’s cocoa trade, that she first began to understand the full story of how chocolate really comes to life.

 

She spent the next four years following the workings of the cocoa industry at its source, meeting and interviewing the smallholder farmers who supply the likes of Cadbury’s with the raw materials they need to keep shelves stocked with luxury chocolate goods. Her reporting on London commodity prices informs her wonderfully engaging Chocolate Nations, but the book’s real insight is the fruit of the time she spent in the thick of the world’s cocoa heartlands. “For the first time,” writes Ryan, “I felt I understood what it meant to describe a product as the lifeblood of a country. I felt physically as far away from the commodity exchange in London as I could possibly be, yet what happened in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire was inextricably linked with what happened in the City of London and in factories such as the one at Bournville.”

 

What happened this year, of course, is that the price of cocoa reached a thirty-two-year high – the main reason being the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producing nation. In recent months, Côte d’Ivoire has grabbed front page headlines as violent clashes erupted on the streets of Abidjan, the country’s commercial capital, following the disputed presidential election held in November of last year. Until UN forces led by France – the former colonial power – swept through the capital last month and ousted the former president, Laurent Gbagbo, from his bunker in the Presidential Palace, Côte d’Ivoire was spiralling downwards into a bloody civil war.

 

Despite international observers declaring Alassane Ouattara the winner of November’s election, Gbagbo stubbornly clung to power, using the vast revenues from taxes on cocoa exports to fund his army and buy arms. In early March, he threatened to eject all multinationals trading in Côte d’Ivoire, effectively nationalising the cocoa industry in a desperate bid to boost his war chest. This move, the US said, “amounts to theft”, and the EU followed up with tough sanctions on exports of Ivorian beans. In the meantime, UN-backed French troops supported by Outtara’s Republican Forces gradually took control of Gbagbo strongholds, with Outtara seizing the ports and impounding all cocoa beans by late March, thereby depriving Gbagbo of his most vital source of income.

 

By the beginning of April the writing was on the wall for Gbagbo and his supporters. Most of his large artillery weapons had been destroyed in UN bombardments in the previous two weeks, with his forces suffering heavy losses in the often fierce battles on the streets of Abidjan. At dawn on April 11th, the decisive blow was struck. Outtara’s troops stormed the bunker in which Gbagbo has been barricaded for his final weeks in power, arresting and forcing him to surrender. So ended the latest bloody chapter of Côte d’Ivoire’s long-running conflict.

 

The recent events in Abidjan raise questions of course about the French connection. Opponents of the UN-backed actions argue that Outtara – married to a French woman and long-time friend of Nicolas Sarkozy – is a puppet installed to protect French interests. The French presence remains considerable in Côte d’Ivoire, especially through commodity houses engaged in the cocoa business. The upheavals threatened French business interests, critics claim, and it was really only Gbagbo’s threat to dissolve all foreign companies and nationalise the cocoa industry that led Paris to press the UN on military intervention. Otherwise, it is suggested, they would have been content to let the conflict rumble on – just so long as the bean supply kept flowing.

 

Chocolate Nations was published just before the military endgame in Côte d’Ivoire, but it has the great merit of giving the reader a detailed background to these latest events, something that is almost always absent from Western media accounts of African conflicts. Ryan shows that the latest dispute between Gbagbo’s and Ouattara’s followers has deep roots stretching back to the 1980s, a dispute as much about democracy as it is about controlling the country’s most abundant natural resource – cocoa.

 

Ever since independence from France in 1960, Côte d’Ivoire has been seen as a miracle state. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country’s first president, encouraged farmers to grow cocoa, and in the years that followed there was an explosion in output. Most of the rich cocoa-growing regions were located in the Christian-dominated south of the country. But short of labour in these fertile areas, Houphouët-Boigny encouraged Muslims in the north and immigrants from Burkino Faso and Mali to settle in southern Côte d’Ivoire to work the land. For a time this worked well, as revenues from cocoa exports flowed into government coffers, and Houphouët-Boigny spent lavishly on schools, ports, roads and hospitals. So extensive were the capital’s refurbishments at this time that, one joke went, a visit to Paris reminded one of the streets of Abidjan.

 

The good times, however, lasted only so long as prices for cocoa remained high. And when they crashed in 1989, Côte d’Ivoire’s economy crumbled. On the back of the boom, many Catholics had moved from their lands in the south to work as civil servants and merchants in Abidjan. But when the economy collapsed and they lost their jobs, the only option many saw was to return to the lands they had vacated decades earlier, now occupied by Muslim northerners and assimilated immigrants. Disputes, often violent, erupted over land ownership. Throughout Houphouët-Boigny’s rule unrest had been managed, often through violent suppression by the state. After his death, however, “these issues bubbled to the surface. What part of Côte d’Ivoire you came from and what papers you had became defining factors in Ivorian politics. Politicians vying for power started to talk about Ivoirité, what makes a true Ivorian,” writes Ryan.

 

In the year 2000, Gbagbo played this ethnic card, successfully gaining a court order that banned Ouattara, a northern Muslim, from running in the upcoming elections on the grounds of his ethnic origins. With Ouattara out, Gbagbo stomped home at the ballot box, but deep resentment at the treatment of the northern constituency had been stoked. Shortly afterwards, rebels from the north attempted a coup. They failed to take over Abidjan, but established control of the northern part of the country. Côte d’Ivoire split in two, and a civil war broke out in 2002. In the months that followed, pro-government militias displaced tens of thousands of Muslim and immigrant landholders in the cocoa strongholds of the south.

 

Since then, brutal murders have been carried out by both sides, with rumours of atrocities committed by bloodthirsty death squads multiplying since January this year. At the heart of the matter is indigenous southern Catholics’ belief that they have a right to take back the lands they vacated in the post-independence years. Those who arrived in the interim from the north and elsewhere to plant cocoa trees – many now resident in the south for over half a century – also believe they have legitimate claims on the land. Although Outtara is now installed as the new president, the country remains as divided as ever. The real challenge for the new regime is to heal the factionalism that divides the country, a task that will require the profits of the cocoa economy to be spread in a way that satisfies both communities and staves off renewed ethnic strife.

 

Ryan’s next assignment was to report on the cocoa trade in neighbouring Ghana. Like Côte d’Ivoire, cocoa revenues are an essential part of the Ghanaian economy – a well-known local phrase translates roughly as “Cocoa is Ghana and Ghana is cocoa.” Earning more than $1.2 billion a year for the country, cocoa is the biggest export and largest source of foreign revenues. Yet despite rising prices on international markets and incremental improvements in living standards, Ghana’s smallholder farmers remain poor.

 

Arriving in the village of Larwehkrom on one visit, Ryan is first struck by the intense chocolaty aroma hanging in the air, as small brown beans dry on reed trays outside every house. But getting the beans onto the trays is a labour-intensive process. They have to be carefully plucked from cocoa pods, after the trees have been pruned, weeded, watered and tended to for months beforehand. And the sweet smell cannot mask the poverty running through the region: children in rags, rutted roads, filthy boreholes and frequent power cuts are common. Farmers’ incomes rarely exceed a few dollars a day, while yields have stagnated due to a lack of funds to invest in better seeds. Then there is the weather: the cocoa tree is delicate ‑ only with the right amounts of sunshine, rainfall and humidity will the pods flourish. In recent years, erratic weather conditions have meant poor harvests. Most farmers Ryan spoke with wanted their children to stay as far away as possible from cocoa. Chocolate is, of course, a big business, but for every €1 spent at the retail end on a Twix, Kit Kat or Hersheys, the farmer in rural Ghana receives a mere four cent. What producers need, Ryan argues, is a voice than can be heard on the world stage.

 

There are also domestic factors that militate against producers earning a fair price for their produce. In Ghana, the Cocoa Board is responsible for selling the country’s beans to foreign buyers, as well as setting the price producers receive. The board, set up in the 1960s to fight on farmers’ behalf, has sprawled in size over the following decades and its workings have been attended by rumours of corruption and cronyism. After agreeing a deal with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the early 2000s, the Ghanaian government committed itself to paying farmers 60 per cent of the market price for their beans. But this was only after years of overtaxing their earnings, leaving the majority destitute. When Ryan arrived in the country in 2007, board officials met her questions with hostility, leaving her to wonder whether producer welfare was really their chief interest.

 

At the same time, she feels that in some cases there could be genuine reasons for board members’ reticence. The global cocoa market, like that for other commodities, is subject to wild price fluctuations. The fixed price set by the government in Accra means that trades for beans between middlemen and farmers in the bush are relatively predictable. But the global futures market is where the board sells the country’s beans. And here – on the trading floors of London, Singapore and New York – accurate information about supply can send the price of beans flying in either direction. Knowledge of conditions on the ground is the best way of finding out about the future supply of cocoa. In this context, mundane reports on rainfall in the south, an outbreak of fungus in the north or a lack of sunshine in the east can be highly sensitive and can move cocoa prices on the international markets. So, fearful of giving competitors an advantage, board members mostly ignored Ryan’s queries. As one former trader told her: “When you have 60 to 70 per cent of the foreign exchange proceeds of your country coming out of your work, that is pressure.”

 

Further pressure has been heaped on board traders in recent years by the spate of mergers between major chocolate companies. Where once there was lively competition between smaller organisations vying for Ghanaian beans now only a handful of serious industry players remain. Different brands may jostle for space on supermarket shelves, but the impression of intense competition is an illusion. Even Green & Black, the once fiercely independent organic chocolate company, is now owned by Cadbury. “Once you strip away the silver wrapping and look behind the advertisements,” writes Ryan, “there is very little real diversity on the shelves.” Unfortunately for board traders, mergers mean that competition has dwindled, and “this puts buyers in a strong commercial position to buy beans at favourable prices”.

 

On top of this, the crash of the equity market has seen a rush of speculative funds into commodity markets, resulting in massive swings in prices. And when prices plunge, as they increasingly do, speculators’ punts in offices in London can have a massive knock-on effect in villages like Larwehkrom ‑ the difference between having enough to eat and going to bed hungry, between having enough money for necessary medicines and doing without.

 

The solution regularly proposed to all this uncertainty is, Ryan notes, Fairtrade. The argument put forward by Fairtrade campaigners is that, for years, buyers have cheated farmers. Farmers complain of weighing scales being rigged to register a lower weight so they don’t receive a fair price for their cocoa. So a straightforward way to get the best possible return for producers is for them to set up their own co-operatives, where farmers have a stake in the company, the Fairtrade movement argues.

 

One of the better known Fairtrade brands, Divine Chocolate, has its origins in one such co-operative in Ghana. Kuapa Kokoo, or the Good Cocoa Farmers Company, was set up in 1993. Kuapa Kokoo guaranteed farmers a minimum price for their beans, as well as promising to reinvest a share of profits in the community through building schools, digging wells and offering interest-free loans to farmers to invest in improving crop yields. By 1998, bars of Divine Chocolate were appearing on supermarket shelves throughout Europe, and the ethical Fairtrade initiative seemed to be reaping rewards for producers. Hot on the heels of Bono and Tony Blair, in 2005 Chris Martin, lead singer with British pop band Coldplay, visited a Ghanaian village to offer his endorsement of Kuapa Kokoo. Surveying the improvements in the village as a result of extra earnings from Divine Chocolate, Ryan quotes Martin: “For every bar of Divine chocolate you’re eating, you’re helping out the people who grew it for you far more than if you eat Nestlé.”

 

Yet Ryan is not satisfied with the simple story told by the celebrity backers. Visiting farmers on the ground, she discovered a muddier reality, as she arrived in cocoa villages at the height of the selling season in mid-September. She was surprised to find that, despite the premium paid by Kuapa, farmers sold beans to other buyers – buyers who did not explicitly invest in their communities. So why, asked Ryan, would farmers choose to sell to such buyers? And the answer, it seems, is a complex one. “Several factors influence the farmers’ choice of buyer,” Ryan observes. “He may be indebted to one particular buyer and be obliged to give him his beans. He may choose to sell his cocoa to two or three buyers, spreading the risk that one may default on payment. His choice of buyer may also depend on who its agent is. He may be a relative or a friend. He may trust one more than another, the decision can be a personal as much as a financial one.”

 

Besides, cash is king: like other buyers, Kuapa experiences cash flow problems, and may not always have ready cash to pay farmers for beans during the selling season. So whoever turns up with cash on the day will usually secure the beans. And in the rush to secure a share of the harvest every September, it can be difficult for Kuapa to have its voice heard at market. In one small village alone, Ryan met twenty-five buyers all competing for farmers’ cocoa. She concludes: “It is little wonder that, for all of Kuapa’s efforts, I met farmers who said they didn’t see much difference between it and other buyers.”

 

But Fairtrade companies like Divine gloss over the nuanced trading games between farmers and buyers in the bush. To try and explain all this would, as Ryan observes, confuse the consumer message. As long as consumers in the West remain happy to pay the premium on ethically traded goods, then Fairtrade companies will continue to airbrush the complex reality of life for cocoa farmers in remote Ghanaian villages. “It seems clear that, whatever Chris Martin says, it will not make that big a difference to the farmer which bar of chocolate [the consumer] picks up.”

 

Another issue Ryan tackles head on is child labour. Child labour on West African cocoa plantations caused a media stir in the early 2000s, and the major chocolate companies, fearful of the impact of bad publicity on sales, promised to carry out a sector-wide inspection of farms and end the practice. Reports of children being trafficked into Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire from neighbouring West African countries to work in slave-like conditions on cocoa farms caused an outcry among campaigning groups in the US and Europe. And as one chocolate industry lobbyist told Ryan, the chocolate companies’ biggest fear is “the headline that could lead to the boycott”.

 

But the issue, Ryan argues, is a complex one, and not best served by neat headlines like that from the BBC documentary which claimed that 90 per cent of Ivorian beans were produced using child slave labour. An in-depth series of nationwide surveys in both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire carried out by researchers presents a more complicated picture, a picture corroborated by Ryan on her many visits to the bush. While many children do work with cocoa, and some in hazardous conditions, children in cocoa-growing regions are more likely to be in the educational system than those from non-cocoa-growing regions. And children clearly work in other sectors in Ghana too, as Ryan observes and any visitor to Accra will be able to confirm from the swarms of child shoe-shiners and street vendors who pester every passer-by. The surveys also find that producers overwhelmingly use family labour, with fewer than a half per cent of children in the cocoa heartlands claiming they were forced by a non-relative into working on farms. Ryan concludes: “In practice, the use of terms like ‘slavery’ or ‘trafficking’ to describe the migration of children in search of work obscures a complex cultural reality.”

 

Explaining this complex cultural reality to well-meaning consumer campaigners in the US and Europe is not always easy. But all the Ghanaian and Ivorian farmers Ryan spoke to did not consider child labour a problem. For them, it is natural for children to help out on the farm. In fact, without their help, most would not be able to stay in business. If it were not for the help supplied by their children, she writes, “smallholders would struggle to harvest the crop. Most simply don’t earn enough to hire other people to do it.”

 

Smallholders eke out a subsistence living at best. “Ethical brands” can help farmers get a better deal, and their media campaigns can embarrass big chocolate companies into greater transparency in their dealings with cocoa-selling governments. But smallholder poverty will disappear only when consumers in the West are prepared to pay up to €4 per 100g of chocolate. While writing her book, Ryan says she was continually asked which chocolate bar she would recommend that best helps producers’ lot. Yet despite her prodigious knowledge of the chocolate industry at every stage the question always left her stumped. The truth is that “there is no one bar of chocolate you can buy which will resolve the situations that I describe in this book”.

 

Back at the museum in Bournville, Ryan experienced a moment of doubt: she had dedicated almost half a decade of her working life trying to understand and then explain to British newspaper readers the everyday realities of West African cocoa farmers’ lives. Yet the story told at Cadbury World has more in common with Willy Wonka than the complex reality she knew. Perhaps chocolate lovers do not have any real appetite to hear the full story of cocoa, tracing it every step of the way from bean to bar.

+++++++++++++++

David Ralph is a freelance journalist, and had recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the Univeristy of Edinburgh. He writes on social affairs for the Irish press.

 

>via: http://www.drb.ie/essays/from-bean-to-bar