Bitter Chocolate (15 page)

Mars has remained a private company to this day, even as it moved to the head of the pack in the United States, with multi-billion-dollar profits. Mars family members are among the richest people in the United States, each worth as much as Ross Perot. Mars, Inc. expanded into manufacturing all types of food, including Uncle Ben's Rice (with the friendly liberated slave on the box), and, in keeping with Forrest's earlier ventures in Britain, pet food such as Whiskas, Sheba, Kal Kan and Pedigree (high-quality pet food is a curious sideline of many chocolate companies).

Swiss chemist Henri Nestlé sold his enterprise long before it became an international conglomerate. The Nestlé instant coffee product Nescafé emerged as a staple for soldiers in the U.S. military, and the company actually made money during the war, when many other food-makers were suffering. The company became the subject of an international boycott when it was accused of aggressively marketing instant powder formula for infants and contributing to a drastic decline of breast-feeding in the developing world. The boycott was huge, lasting from 1977 to 1984, but Nestlé recovered and aggressively gobbled up Maggi seasonings and soups, Libby's foods, Stouffer's and San Pellegrino, along with pet food companies including Ralston Purina and Friskies.

The chocolate business, predictably, has shifted from family-run enterprises to corporations and multinational conglomerates,
and a fiercely competitive industry has consolidated into large monopolies and cartels. Most of the cocoa companies have entered collective umbrella organizations that provide professional spokespeople to deal with thorny issues such as “Where do the beans come from?” and “Under what conditions do those workers live?” No company wants to answer directly, as George Cadbury was willing to do in his own newspaper.

In recent years, the dirty work of buying and selling cocoa beans has become the domain of giant food conglomerates such as Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands—anonymous corporations that are able to deal with the imperatives of the industry, particularly the constant, pulsing pressure to find cheap sources of beans so they can keep prices reduced. Low prices are what consumers consider fair, even if their affordable goods create injustice elsewhere. And into the coming decades, cocoa would continue to claim its victims.

F
OR MUCH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, BRITISH
authorities claimed that their agents had introduced cocoa to the Gold Coast, and an early version of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
even describes Ghanaian cocoa farms as an English colonizer's initiative. The British not only had little to do with bringing cocoa to West Africa, but also almost destroyed what the Africans had achieved with great effort.

The lion's share of the credit for introducing
Theobroma
cacao trees to the region goes to an African named Tetteh Quarshie. Born to a land-owning farm family in Gold Coast, Quarshie was trained by Basel missionaries to be a master blacksmith, a trade that allowed him to make a reasonable living. He travelled to other colonies for work and eventually found himself on the Spanish slave island of Fernando Po (now Bioko).

Quarshie was fascinated with the strange crop that European merchants obsessed over and Angolan slaves laboured and died for. The short, broad-leafed
Theobroma
tree, with its large gourd-like pods growing right from the trunk, was unlike anything Quarshie had ever seen in Africa. But more interesting, he realized that it produced possibly the most perfect cash crop
imaginable. The tree thrives in a mixed farm operation and it flourishes best when surrounded by other crops, especially food-producing ones. Since
Theobroma
needs shade, the tall banana plant with its broad canopy of leaves is a perfect neighbour; yam and cassava crops around its feet contribute to a nourishing sponge-like mulch, perfect for retaining moisture and a habitat for the tiny mites that pollinate the fragile cocoa flower. A sterile plantation-style monocultural environment—such as what are often the conditions for coffee and rubber—is disastrous for cocoa. And there is no machine that can cultivate or harvest cocoa as effectively as the human hand. Compact, family-run mixed farm operations are ideal for
Theobroma
, and for Africans.

The peripatetic Quarshie returned to his village in the Gold Coast after six years abroad, carrying with him precious cocoa seeds. He propagated them and then distributed stock as well as seeds to other farmers. The climate and soil in the Gold Coast were perfect for the variety he brought home with him—the Forastero, a hardy and prolific variety of “food of the gods.”

Quarshie couldn't have foreseen when he planted his cocoa seeds in the late 1870s that thirty years later, when the trees were mature and bearing fruit, dramatic circumstances would place him in the middle of a confluence of developments in Europe and America. As international consumers clamoured for chocolate bars and cocoa, Caribbean and Latin American plantations had become disease-ridden and incapable of meeting the new demand. And anti-slavery crusaders were blowing the whistle on the Portuguese islands in the coastal areas where Quarshie had worked for the Spanish. His timing turned out to be perfect. Enter Cadbury, looking for scandal-free beans, and soon the cocoa farmers of Gold Coast were enjoying a brisk trade.

The British government, for its part, hardly seemed to know cocoa was growing in its colony until the trees were mature and Cadbury came along. At the time, British interest in its African
colonies was centred on the lucrative mines in Rhodesia and South Africa. But with a new market for
Theobroma
from the mineral-depleted Gold Coast, the British government quickly clambered on board.

A review in the
Journal of Economic History
entitled “Cocoa in the Gold Coast,” published in 1966, documents the extent to which the colonial administrators of the early twentieth century misunderstood both the importance of cocoa and the science of cocoa cultivation. Once they became involved, British bureaucrats railed at the farmers for what they considered to be sloppy and inefficient agricultural practices. They insisted that the farmers raze the existing forests to create large plantations, then plant their trees in long, neat rows, and scrupulously weed and ditch to create dry and tidy fields, clear of all unattractive debris. The farmers argued that the trees required disorder—the shade of other trees and plants, the tangle of weeds and mulch. But the protests of Africans were met with derision from the bwanas. “The producers of cocoa in this colony and the Ashanti are natives in a most elementary state of civilization whose sole aim, as yet, appears to be the attainment of the maximum amount of money for a minimum expenditure of energy, however uneconomical the system,” said one report from 1916.

The same “sessional paper” laments that cocoa production was much better managed on the Portuguese islands of Príncipe and São Tomé because the colonizers used coercive means, something the report's author suggested the British colony might consider: “Peaceful persuasion by the few available officers of this Department is not often successful … legislation appears essential to impress necessary cultural reforms upon a people incapable of taking the necessary measures to ensure the future prosperity of the industry.”

Despite British bureaucratic meddling, the Gold Coast became the world's leading cocoa bean exporter by 1920. The seeds and the know-how spread to other farming enterprises—large and small—
throughout equatorial Africa. African farmers not only had another cash crop, along with coffee and palm oil, on which to depend, but also one that was compatible with their various farming operations.

The Gold Coast gained its independence from Great Britain in 1956, the first West African country to do so, and its founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, renamed the country Ghana, after an ancient African kingdom. Independent Ghana would grow rich—at least for a few decades—on cocoa.

Nkrumah was a charismatic African nationalist who was no admirer of his former colonial masters. He'd done hard jail time for his left-wing views and for political agitation. But he was part of a new generation of African leaders determined and obviously able to throw off the suffocating mantle of colonial power. It was, at first, an optimistic breath of spring in Africa, fragrant with the anticipation of freedom and self-rule. Nkrumah declared: “We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundations.”

As president, Nkrumah took over the cocoa marketing board from the British and soon after attempted to create a cartel through which cocoa producers could collectively fix the price of the beans. The big chocolate companies had been through it all before. Milton Hershey had put an end to such shenanigans in the 1930s and his company would help to do it again. The Hershey archive reveals some of what the company did to crush this nascent African movement when it reared its head in the early 1960s. “Everybody in the company worked on that one,” said Richard Uhrich, the man in charge of buying for Hershey. “We all had to agree because this required borrowing a lot of money.”

Uhrich was interviewed as part of an oral history project at Hershey, and a transcript of his remarks in the Hershey archive is revealing: “We bought—oh such tremendous quantities of cocoa
beans that you couldn't believe it,” Uhrich says of one buying spree in 1965. “We bought them with no place to store them when they started arriving [laughs] so we had to do all kinds of things.” Uhrich describes how they rented warehouse space in an old hosiery mill, a former train car factory and even an abandoned mushroom plant in order to stock the thousands of tons of beans from Africa. “When this stuff started arriving, oh my gad
[sic]
, we were working around the clock to unload these things. They were coming in so fast you couldn't believe it. Trainloads of them were coming!”

The company sat on the beans until the price started to climb and then they flooded the market. The result was predictable. That was end of Africa's cocoa cartel.

The bottom fell out of the price of cacao beans in the 1970s while Ghana was heavily in debt. Nkrumah had been ousted, his promises of a new Africa supplanted by cynicism and disappointment. His own corruption and incompetence had doomed his messianic project for a new African democracy. Many farmers abandoned cocoa in favour of food crops that fetched less money but were not subject to the power of the chocolate companies.

Some Ghanaian farmers tried to stick it out. The problem was, as accommodating as
Theobroma
is of other crops, it is also a finicky plant that requires perfect growing conditions and a great deal of tender care. Expensive pesticides and herbicides increase its longevity and productivity, but as the big cocoa companies controlled the price of beans, the cost of maintaining the tree was often more than the cocoa was worth. Instead of tree husbandry, many Ghanaian farmers simply cleared more rainforests and planted more trees, abandoning the fallow farms behind them. As the rainforests disappeared, severe drought became common; finally, in the early 1980s, devastating fires destroyed most of Ghana's cocoa crops.

With a shrug, the chocolate companies did exactly what they had been doing for centuries: they moved on in search of a new
frontier, new resources to satisfy the now globally entrenched chocolate addiction. They found what they were looking for just next door, in Côte d'Ivoire.

Rising out of the dense, steamy tropical forest like an apparition, Our Lady of Peace Basilica, on the city limits of Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire, rivals the Vatican both in dimension and pretension. By papal request, the dome is not as high as that of St. Peter's. But the gold crucifix atop the cupola thrusts into the African sky just far enough to make the entire structure even taller than the church in Rome. No pale imitation of the original, in many ways the African version is more magnificent. The architect had the advantage of the modern materials and technology of the 1980s and was able to construct a lofty, egg-shaped shell almost entirely out of stained glass. A total of
7,400
square metres of windows contains three dozen biblical scenes, each one crafted by the most talented glassworks artisans in all of Europe.

Inside, seating places among the rows of polished wooden pews have individual air conditioners, giving worshippers the luxury of forgetting they are in the midst of hot, humid equatorial banana and cocoa plantations and allowing them to focus on communing with God. There is also standing room for eleven thousand people inside the church, and a plaza (again reminiscent of the Vatican) in front of the grand doors can accommodate another 300,000 faithful. Sprawled out beyond the plaza is a generous parking lot. Given that the population of Catholics in the whole of Côte d'Ivoire totals not more than a million (and precious few of them have cars), spread over a country of 320,000 square kilometres, a casual observer might well wonder what the basilica is really all about.