“The dense rainforests of Ivory Coast and the animals that living in are disappearing at great speed due to illegal cocoa plantations.” This is revealed by a new report entitled “Dark Chocolate’s Secret” by the non-governmental organization Mighty Earth, which denounces how a large amount of cocoa used by leading chocolate companies like Mars, Nestlé, Ferrero, Lindt and Cadbury is illegally cultivated in national parks and in other conservation lands of the world’s leading cocoa production country.
The environmental organization claims to have discovered a long supply chain of “illegal” cocoa exploitation from protected areas, following the path of this cocoa to sales to the big names of the chocolate industry, which is managed by major agro-food companies like Olam, Cargill and Barry Callebaut, who together control about half of global product trade.
The report specifies that cocoa passes by farmers through intermediaries to traders who then sell it in Europe and the United States where the biggest chocolate companies turn it into truffles, tablets, barrels, syrups and candy.
The investigation shows how a part of the chocolate consumed in the world comes from primary forests and protected parks in Ivory Coast. In particular, the phenomenon concerns the forests of Goin Debé, Scio and those of Mount Sassandra, as well as those of the national parks of Taï, Mont Peko and Marahoué.
According to Mighty Earth, the business is so vast that the protected areas have sometimes become real cities, as happened in the Scio forest, where thousands of inhabitants live and over time have arisen twenty-two cocoa warehouses, a mosque, a school, dozens of shops and health-care dispensaries.
Moreover, chocolate trade is a global business, which in 2015 has cost about one hundred billion dollars. Every year almost three million tons of chocolate and other cocoa products are consumed in the world, while demand rises by 2-5%.
Ohio University study
The report also mentions a study published in March 2015, conducted by researchers at Ohio State University’s Anthropology Department and various Ivorian academic institutions, which examined 23 protected areas in Ivory Coast. The report found that seven of them had been almost entirely converted to cocoa, while thirteen were no longer populated by primates and in the other five monkeys had reduced by half. Not to mention that deforestation has practically decimated the chimpanzees, who took refuge in a few small areas and are now considered an endangered species.
Illegal crops have also thinned the elephant population, the country’s national symbol, which by hundreds of thousands have reduced to about 200-400 specimens, spurred by deforestation in tiny breeds of the forest, where poachers can locate them more easily.
Most of the world’s chocolate is produced and consumed in Europe and North America, far from the fields of West Africa where most of the cocoa is grown. And in the developed world, chocolate is considered an accessible good consumed by ordinary people.
On the contrary, in West Africa, chocolate is a rare good, absolutely not in the reach of the majority of the population, and most of the cocoa growers in the region have never experienced the taste of chocolate, which has its greatest environmental impact in this part of Africa.
The collapse of the cocoa price
Not to mention, that in this, the Ivorian economy and the Ghanaian economy are heavily plagued by the fall in cocoa prices on international markets, down by more than 30% in recent months. The debacle hit hard on Yamoussoukro’s tax revenue, passing the guaranteed minimum price to 1,100 to 700 Swiss francs ($ 1.28) and reducing the shipping fee from 22% to the current 16%.
A situation that last August led the African Development Bank (AFDB) to decide to intervene in support of Ivory Coast and Ghana (second world producer of cocoa) by accepting the funding request of $ 1.2 billion , which the governments of the two countries had forwarded to the pan-African credit institution.
Unfortunately, it should also be remembered that investigating certain issues sometimes means endangering life, as was the case with Franco-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer, who disappeared in April 2004 in Abidjan and never found again.
The journalist vanished into thin air while he was working on a reportage about corruption in the Ivorian cocoa industry. In July last year, during the trial for crimes against humanity angainst Simone Gbabo, wife of former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, it emerged that Kieffer would be executed and his body cremated on the order of the former first lady.
However, the “Iron Dame”, already sentenced to twenty years in prison for violence following the 2010 elections, has denied any involvement in the disappearance of the reporter whose fate is still wrapped up in the mystery.
@afrofocus
“The dense rainforests of Ivory Coast and the animals that living in are disappearing at great speed due to illegal cocoa plantations.” This is revealed by a new report entitled “Dark Chocolate’s Secret” by the non-governmental organization Mighty Earth, which denounces how a large amount of cocoa used by leading chocolate companies like Mars, Nestlé, Ferrero, Lindt and Cadbury is illegally cultivated in national parks and in other conservation lands of the world’s leading cocoa production country.
