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.”