Gluttony and chocolate drive birthday parties, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas and Halloween.
“All of our great celebrations of life are associated with chocolate,” says Carol Off, author of Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet.
Even three million tons of chocolate a year is not enough to satisfy the world’s voracious appetite. More than two thirds of it comes from Africa.
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The chocolate craze began with the harvesting of cocoa by 16th-century Spanish settlers in Central America, where it was discovered. Five hundred years later, West Africa grows 70% of the world’s cocoa. The industry is valued at $105 billion. The Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria are the world’s three largest producers. The Ivory Coast produces 41% of the world’s cocoa. It grows around $1 billion worth annually.
For more than two million small-holder African cocoa farmers—90% of which are family-owned farms no bigger than 5 hectares—cocoa is life. Aside from this, the chocolate industry is fragile. Small farms often struggle against bad weather conditions, pests and disease, which can cut yields by 40% annually, according to the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO). Ecobank predicts that this year’s delayed, but good, rains in the Ivory Coast will boost mid-crop yield to 350,000 tons: a 10% increase compared to the last 10 years. Despite this good fortune, the people who grow the cocoa complain they are being squeezed.
“Cocoa farmers in West Africa receive between 3.5% and 6.4% of the final value of a chocolate bar (depending on the percentage cocoa content), whereas the manufacturer’s share has increased from 56% to 70% and the retailer’s share from 12% to 17%,” according to the Fairtrade Foundation. It campaigns for a bigger share for the growers.
The World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) launched the African Cocoa Initiative (ACI) in mid-March. It encourages profitable sustainability by equipping 100,000 cocoa famers, over five years, with farming and management skills. The ACI increases farmers’ revenues and helps to raise low yields. The foundation’s member companies—Barry Callebaut, Ferrero, Kraft Foods, Lindt &amp; Sprüngli, Mars and Nestlé—pay for it.
While the cocoa industry is lucrative, farmers in the Ivory Coast are being wooed by rubber. Cocoa farmers are replacing ageing plantations with rubber seedlings. Rubber—after around seven years—produces a monthly income, whereas the average cocoa tree bears 30 pods over two annual crops.  This is nearly enough to produce 1kg of dark chocolate, according to the Hershey Company.
Ghana, which meets 18% of the global demand, is the second-biggest supplier of cocoa. Author Carol Off traveled to Ghana to investigate the cocoa industry. She wrote of falling abusive labor practices and better healthcare. On the other side of the coin, cocoa farmers are also accused of reporting lower yields and hiding beans to raise the market price. Illegal smuggling between cocoa producing countries is also rumored.
The Ghanaian cocoa industry is regulated by Cocobod, which ensures a fixed price at the beginning of each season. If prices fluctuate during the season, farmers are paid the difference. Farmers sell their cocoa beans to licensed buying companies. This regulation ensures that high-quality Ghanaian cocoa beans are highly sought after.
There’s an apparent paradox: Africa is the world’s leading cocoa supplier, yet the top 10 confectionary companies are outside Africa; most are based in Europe and the United States. While the challenges of producing in Africa are plenty, so are the opportunities.
Afrotropic Cocoa Processing, a Ghanaian manufacturing company, grinds over 6,000 metric tons of local cocoa beans annually. It sells its products—cocoa liquor, cocoa butter and cocoa powder—to international food manufacturers. A large percentage of European chocolate is made from Ghanaian cocoa. Switzerland eats the most chocolate. World-famous companies like Cailler-Néstle, Toblerone, Lindt, Teuscher and Sprüngli call it home.
Kraft Foods is the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer, and has manufacturing plants in South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Kenya and Namibia. It is leading by example with commitments of $150 million towards investment in manufacturing facilities in the Southern Africa region over the next three years. Cadbury, owned by Kraft Foods, buys its cocoa beans from Ghana and Nigeria and manufactures in South Africa and Namibia. By 2015, Nestlé, the third largest manufacturer, will add five African factories to its already existing 28. A two-fold increase in its products, in the last few years, has made it more competitive.
These companies understand that this investment is a stepping-stone into African markets. What if chocolate brands like CÔte d’Or and Toblerone, both owned by Kraft Foods, were being made in Africa? This development of skilled jobs would help to alleviate poverty and possibly decrease the cost of production.
During the last decade, Africa has boasted a 5% annual growth. While the continent is open to industrial growth, it only accounts for 1% of global manufacturing. Africa is a fertile terrain for private-sector investments in industry and manufacturing, with small manufacturers going where multinationals fear to tread. Africa has the capacity to become a manufacturing powerhouse.
Madécasse chocolate is the proof. It has created jobs by producing chocolate in Madagascar. While problems with electricity and water persist, the company is training up a skilled workforce. Maybe investing in chocolate is as simple as spotting the obvious that everyone else misses.

The World Eats:  Africa Misses Out

My seven-year old nephew recently asked me a sticky question: “Uncle Musky, where do chocolates come from?”
“Chocolates?” I quipped, scanning my mental box for a passable answer. “Yes, chocolates,” he repeated, licking choc-soiled fingers. “Where do they come from?”
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Chocolates come from the cocoa tree, I said, wondering if he would buy the truth. “Cocoa tree?” he bellowed. “Where do cocoa trees grow, do we have cocoa trees in Nigeria?” I rolled my eyes: “How can we not have cocoa trees?!” Time for a quick geography lesson, I muttered to myself. We spent the next 10 minutes discussing the origins and uses of cocoa; cultivated in the tropics, its produce consumed in a variety of forms globally.
When my informed ignorance of the bitter-sweet bean began to wane, I grabbed an encyclopaedia (thank goodness for a good, old fashioned home library; and by the way, how many people still read hardcover tomes these days?) and, together, we searched for ‘chocolate’ which referenced the word ‘cocoa’ or ‘cacao tree’, the last term being a tree that produces an ovoid-shaped pod (fruit) containing cacao seeds or beans; the trees growing naturally in the South American jungle, thousands of years ago, well before processed cacao products began to go mainstream slightly over 100 years ago. Its scientific name: theobroma cacao, the Latin word ‘theobroma’ literally meaning “food of the gods” in English and ‘cacao’ being an Aztec word.
We read that it was the Spanish conquistadors (where didn’t they go?) that introduced cacao to the rest of the world (and I was thinking aloud, “but how can that be? Is it possible that they sold cacao beans to their trading partners in Africa, who then began to cultivate them?”). By now, my positively pesky one was staring suspiciously at my ugly face.
His mind was gyrating. “Aztec, Spanish sailors, America, Asia, Africa, where is Africa, is Africa in Nigeria?”, “Latin&#8230;What is Latin?”, “Food of the gods, who are gods?”, “Does God eat chocolates too?” I could see a litany of questions welling up in his eyes, so, smart lazy adult that I was, I swerved the conversation into a cul-de-sac.
Here was I, face-to-face with honest ignorance, confronting the classic heuristic dilemma of urban kids growing up in today’s Nigeria—let’s call them ‘Generation Y+’.
Born and bred in the early years of the 21st century, they will never grasp the agronomical world of their forbearers. Try telling the Y+ clan that rice (especially the American long grain type) was, not too long ago, an uncommon, foreign delicacy. Try informing them that the chocolates they now consume in various forms was once so rare, and so expensive only the elite and wannabe bourgeoisie could be seen enjoying them. These days, we all gobble up chocolate bars, chocolate sweets, chocolate-coated biscuits, a pantheon of chocolate cakes, and chocolate-flavoured cereals almost recklessly. Nigeria now has a confusing assortment of chocolate beverages, chocolate-flavoured yoghurts, chocolate-choked confectionaries and chocolate ice-creams to choose from.
The hot, humid climate also helps. Try drinking cold chocolate in steamy 35oC weather—or a warm cup on a cold, wet morning. I have not seen one person who has said anything bad about chocolates, except that too much of it may ruin your digestive borders, if you get my drift. A chocolate drink is a breakfast staple in most Nigerian homes, and for many, especially young, folks, saying “I want to drink tea” actually means “can I have a chocolate drink?”
So, now let us talk about Nigeria’s choc-revolution. The global obsession for ‘nice and sweet’ edibles has crept into Nigerian society like the subtle haze of a misty morning. Our choc-trajectory has been a long and trickling, subliminal evolution of our culinary culture. This was a land once famous for its cocoa plantations. The story of theobroma cacao in Naija (as most Nigerian youths call their country) chronicles the gastro-agrarian history of Chinua Achebe’s homeland. Once a grand and scenic symbol of Nigeria’s agricultural fecundity, the “Groundnut Pyramids” of northern Nigeria were the envy of the world, the nutty equivalents of the pyramids of Mount Sinai in Egypt, supplying the world with its stock of peanuts and vegetable oils (as recorded in Nigeria’s N200 bill).
Today, the peanut pyramids have been levelled, replaced by a plethora of urban jungles and conurbations; and the forests of the future continue to disappear as peanut fields, maize, cashew, oil palm and cocoa plantations struggle for space and economic relevance with religious institutions and property developers. This was how Nigeria lost its once prominent position in the global comity of cocoa growers, and thanks to ‘new age, modern’ realities (meaning global trade, cyberspace and the Anglo-Saxon influence), Nigerians now consume more cocoa and cocoa-based products than they produce. “My fridge is a haven of chocolate bars…especially white chocolate, I love them,” Ms. Uduak Johnson, a Lagos-based retailer told FORBES AFRICA.
With close to six million farmers producing an estimated three million tons of cocoa annually, about 50 million people worldwide depend on the crop for their livelihood, according to the World Cocoa Foundation. A glut of family-owned farms in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana produce 70% of this global output.
A significant share of these West African produce ends up in Africa’s largest population patch, as Nigerian and foreign companies in the food and beverages, pharmaceutical, personal care sectors buy up raw and semi-processed bean stock from farmers and trading companies, and the rest, as they say, is yum yum…chocolate bars, cakes, biscuits, toffees, and cocoa-based beverages.
So, the question, “where do chocolates come from?” deserves another answer. Chocolates do not come from cocoa trees. “They come from choc-factories in Austria, Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, the United Kingdom, America, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Turkey, Switzerland, Ghana, even China and all those other places that Nigerians like to buy their sweets from,” says Mr Alan Akinkunle-Baker, a Nigerian-born, UK-based management consultant. “Our chocolate habit is really an imported culture.”
I disagree. Cacao consumption was a universal routine in previous millennia, well before ‘globalization’ arrived. The Spanish and South Americans must agree to share the credit for introducing cocoa to the rest of the world with their West African cousins. We need a Pan-African conference on the origins of theobroma cacao.

Tag: Cocoa Tree

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The World Eats: Africa Misses Out

The Food of The Gods