Bitter Chocolate (45 page)

The interviews here were conducted in May and June 2005 in the centre and southwest of Côte d'Ivoire. There is ample information on the Internet about the chemical benefits of chocolate, though we should be aware that many of the research findings that extol the virtues of chocolate, true or not, are funded by the chocolate companies. See the
New York Times Magazine
article “Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?” by Jon Gertner from October 10, 2004, for a good debunking of some chocolate health claims.

The most authoritative history of chocolate is
The True History of Chocolate
by Sophie and Michael Coe, the source of much of the history in this section. Additional material came from the research of Boston University scholars Patricia A. McAnany and Satoru Murata,
From Chocolate Pots to Maya Gold: Belizean Cacao Farmers through the Ages
, of which I was generously given a working copy; Henry Kamen's book
Philip of Spain;
Jim Tuck's
History of Mexico: Affirmative Action and Hernán Cortés;
Anthony Pagden's translation of Hernán Cortés's
Letters from Mexico;
C.A. Burland's
Montezuma: Lord of the Aztecs;
and Richard Lee Marks's
Cortés: The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico
.

The sources cited for Chapter One were used again here, as well as the authoritative
A History of the Modern World
by R.R. Palmer
and Joel Colton. Adam Hochschild's book
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
was a source of information on the slave trade, as was Peter Macinnis's book
Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar
.

Material for this chapter came from
Honderd Jaar (Hundred Years)
, a centennial book published in 1928 on the hundredth anniversary of the firm J.C. Van Houten and Son, parts of which were superbly translated for me by my CBC colleague Jet Belgraver. The
Anti-Slavery Reporter
is available at the University of Birmingham Special Collections, along with the Cadbury Brothers archive, from which much material came. More material on the Rowntree family and its company came from the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, U.K. Lowell J. Satre's book
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business
was an important source for this chapter, especially for the dramatic trial anecdotes and for information about Henry Woodd Nevinson, of whom little is written. Adam Hochschild's book
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
has the extraordinary story of Edmund Dene Morel and his battle with the monarch of Belgium.

Material about Milton Snavely Hershey and his company came from the Hershey archive and from oral history in Hershey, Pennsylvania, as well as from residents of Hershey who had personal knowledge of the history. More material about both Hershey and the Mars empire came from Joel Glenn Brenner's book
The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars; Crisis in Candyland: Melting the Chocolate Shell of the Mars Family Empire
by Jan Pottker;
Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams
by Michael D'Antonio;
Milton Hershey:
Chocolate King, Town Builder
by Charnan Simon; and
Chocolate by Hershey: A Story about Milton S. Hershey
by Betty Burford.

In addition to travel and research in Côte d'Ivoire, I consulted Peter Schwab's book
Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs;
Joseph E. Stiglitz's
Globalization and Its Discontents; Africans and Their History
by Joseph E. Harris;
Hungry for Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade
by John Madeley; and
La guerre du cacao: Histoire secrète d'un embargo
by Jean-Louis Gombeaud, Corinne Moutout and Stephen Smith. Additional material came from
Africa Report
articles from the 1970s about problems with the African Miracle;
The Economist
articles on Côte d'Ivoire from the 1960s and 1970s; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reports; World Bank reports from the 1980s:
Structural Readjustment for Côte d'Ivoire;
“Employment Problems and Policies in the Ivory Coast” from the
International Labor Review
of December 1971; the 1961 edition of
Political Africa: A Who's Who of Personalities and Parties;
and the 1961 review
Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa
, edited by James S. Coleman and Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. For material about Ghana (Gold Coast) and its beginnings in cocoa, I consulted the 1966
Journal of Economic History
.

Most of the material for this chapter came from first-person interviews with Abdoulaye Macko and Salia Kante; with people working at Save the Children Canada and the Malian NGOs Mali Enjeu and Guamina; with the BBC's Humphrey Hawksley; and with representatives of the government of Côte d'Ivoire. Additional material came from newspaper accounts, BBC reports, UNICEF reports and U.S. State Department reports.

Material for this chapter came from travel in West Africa and interviews with the principal players in Canada, the United States and Europe, including the NGOs; the labour organizations; politicians; the chocolate companies by way of their umbrella organization, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association; and the confectionery Manufacturers Association of Canada and their public relations people. Other sources used for this chapter include reports by Anti-Slavery International, in particular the exhaustive 2004 study called
The Cocoa Industry in West Africa: A History of Exploitation
, which has much useful field study information; a series of detailed reports by Anita Sheth of Save the Children Canada; reports by the International Institute of Tropical agriculture, which performed the survey; and the Harkin-Engel Protocol.

This chapter was developed almost entirely from interviews with cocoa farmers and their workers, both in Côte d'Ivoire and in Mali, plus interviews with political players in Côte d'Ivoire, including Roger Gnohite and Charles Blé Goudé, and with NGOs, both on and off the record. Additional secondary source material came from reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

Material for this chapter came from travel and interviews in Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, and from interviews with principal players in the Protocol, including the NGOs, labour leaders, Winrock International, the World Cocoa Foundation and the International Labor Rights Fund, supplemented with material from all of their websites.

This chapter was built almost entirely from interviews conducted in Côte d'Ivoire, Canada and France with the friends, family, colleagues and enemies of Guy-André Kieffer, most of whom are named in the text. A number of them chose to be interviewed anonymously because they feared for their safety.

This chapter was crafted from interviews in Côte d'Ivoire with the principal players of the cocoa
filière
, plus members of the cocoa cooperatives and farmers. Many of them cannot be named for their safety. On-the-ground research was also done in Fulton, New York.

Material for this chapter came from on-the-ground travels in Belize, interviews with farmers and their association, and interviews with Green & Black's, Global Exchange and other experts on fair trade, plus extensive archival documents on Hummingbird Hershey and its operations in the Toledo district.

Travesty Productions' film
The Five Cent War
is the best source of the story of the children's chocolate strike. Additional material for this chapter came from archives at the Toronto Reference Library.

THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, OR HAVE BEEN
as informed as I believe it is, without the efforts of Maggie MacIntyre, my researcher and editorial assistant. Maggie travelled to Great Britain, France, the United States and Belize for this project, using her extraordinary range of talents to suss out the stories and facts, whether they were to be found with a reluctant interview subject or in a labyrinthine library archive. My first debt of gratitude is to her.

Ange Aboa was a tireless, amusing and very informed escort for my travels in Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. Koffi Benoît did all the driving for many hard weeks over deplorable roads, but he still had the energy and wit to negotiate lower “fees” with the police and soldiers who extorted money from us almost on an hourly basis. Ange and Koffi made a difficult, often-dangerous trip enjoyable.

I was also happy to have the reassurance of Benoît Gauthier, first secretary of political and cultural affairs for the Canadian Embassy in Abidjan, who kept a bead on me during all my movements in the country, and then kept me informed about the changing landscape of Côte d'Ivoire.

I will never forget the company of Youchaou Traoré, who travelled with me in Mali, translating and explaining things patiently. His breadth of knowledge and depth of personal experience is only exceeded by his warmth and charm. Youchaou's family took me in, fed me and entertained me graciously. Special thanks to Salia Kante for his honesty and integrity and for his endless struggle to help children.

Jean-François Bélanger, Radio Canada's reporter in West Africa, was extremely helpful, finding me contacts, numbers and background. I am in his debt. Humphrey Hawksley of the BBC gave me the insights and advantage of his extensive experience both in Africa and on the cocoa file; Bernard Taylor of Partnership Africa Canada and David Lord of the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee shared with me their extensive contacts in West Africa.

In France, the friends, colleagues and family members of Guy-André Kieffer were especially generous. Of those who can be named, I would like to thank Aline Richard, Léonard Vincent of Reporters Without Borders, Thomas Hoffnung of Libération and Antoine Glaser of
La Lettre du Continent
. The others, who remain anonymous, know that I would like to thank them as well, and one day I will be able to do it more publicly.

In Belize, many thanks must go to everyone at the Toledo Cacao Growers Association—Gregor Hargrove, in true Maritime style, was frank, welcoming and passionate about his work; Armando Choco, Annamarie Cho and Oscar Canelo shared their first-hand knowledge of cocoa culture; and the farmers shared their stories of struggle, sweat and success.

Anita Sheth was the first person to bring to my attention the issue of child labour exploitation in cocoa, and I admire her for her tireless pursuit of children's rights. Richard Swift of the
New Internationalist
shared with me his cocoa research in West Africa; Professor Patricia McAnany of Boston University gave me generous access to her research as well.

Libraries and archives are essential for any book like this. I am indebted to the Toronto Reference Library, York University Library in York, England, the Cadbury papers in the University of Birmingham Special Collections, the Hershey archive in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the ICCO library in London.

Jet Belgraver, my colleague at CBC TV, provided reliable information on the Dutch cocoa industry, blowing through a fair
bit of folklore, and she also translated much material, even after she knew that this book might damage her ability to enjoy chocolate in the future. Other colleagues who routinely fed my craving for news about the cocoa industry, while knowingly affecting their future indulgence of chocolate, include Harry Schachter, Dan Schwartz and Jay Bertagnolli. Special thanks to Alex Shprintsen for his moral support and for procuring for me the best chocolate I sampled in the course of writing this book. It's made in Russia!

Don Sedgwick and Shaun Bradley are my agents but that doesn't come close to explaining what they do for me, both personally and professionally. In addition to careful and helpful reading of this manuscript and many fine suggestions for how to make the book better, they have been much moral support throughout the project.

Anne Collins, publisher of Random House Canada is, of course, the person who made this book possible. Her encouragement to me as an editor along with her rigour as a journalist made this book much stronger than it deserved to be with my talents. I also had the great pleasure of working for the first time with Pamela Murray, managing editor at Random House Canada, who performed some hard slogs through every version of the manuscript (which will be happily relegated to the recycling bin) and helped me make huge improvements, while encouraging me to continue. Scott Sellers, Random House of Canada's director of marketing strategy, gave me much encouragement for this book and I know he'll get me through the hard sell as well. Kevin Kelly, who did the publicity photos for this book, must be mentioned. He not only made me look reasonably good—an almost impossible task—but also was a joy to work with.

My husband, Linden MacIntyre, knows what he did to help me write this work and if I spelled out my entire acknowledgement to him it would be longer than the book itself. Suffice it to say, you wouldn't be reading these pages today if not for him.

My final debt of gratitude is to the children of Sinikosson who inspired me, more than anyone, to write this book and to explain why the gulf must be closed between the hand that picks the bean and the hand that unwraps the candy.