Bitter Chocolate (39 page)

Cargill has said in the past that its corporate goal is to double in size every five to seven years. Its multi-billion-dollar annual turnover rivals the GDP of all of the poorest sub-Saharan countries put together. Like all transnationals in agriculture, Cargill has helped to persuade countries to abandon food production in favour of export crops, with help from World Bank liberalization schemes that strong-arm developing countries into importing food, principally from transnationals. Cargill's trade in coffee alone is greater than the aggregate GDP of the countries where it buys the coffee. It's one of the world's biggest players in genetically modified foods, and it is fighting strenously to open African farmland to its scientifically produced seed stock.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the other dominatrix in international agriculture, and is second only to Cargill in Ivorian cocoa trading. ADM is the largest processor of cocoa beans in the world, manufacturing much of the raw material that becomes the brand name chocolate confections we eat. What ADM does best, though, is play politics. This publicly traded company has been one of the largest recipients of corporate welfare in the United States, much of it through personal suasion in the corridors of power.
Fortune
magazine once called agribusiness “the most manipulated industry on the planet,” and few play the game better than ADM.

In his book
Rats in the Grain: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer Daniels Midland, the Supermarket to the World
, American author James Lieber describes the extraordinary influence ADM has had: “Probably no one since the trust chieftains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has drawn more on the
connection between business and politics or done more to cultivate government officials.” Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, whose Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement profited U.S. corporations such as ADM, sits on the company's prestigious board of directors. When Senator Tom Harkin (of the Harkin-Engel Protocol) was being sued for libel in the early 1990s, the head of ADM put $10,000 into his defence fund. Harkin is from Iowa, a leading U.S. producer of ethanol, a controversial fuel additive that ADM manufactures. Ethanol kept ADM “drunk on tax dollars” as one think tank expert noted. James Lieber discovered that, by the late 1990s, ADM had become the number one recipient in the United States of all government subsidies to corporations.

While the Washington-based international financial institutions forced Côte d'Ivoire to suspend government subsidies to its agricultural sector and to dismantle its marketing boards, heavily subsidized American corporations were able to move in and take control of the country's cocoa trade. The monopoly over cocoa and coffee in Côte d'Ivoire means that no indigenous company can get even a toehold in the business. The transnational corporations encourage overproduction of their commodities throughout the world as a way of keeping the price as low as possible and discouraging other players. With so little functioning state machinery in Côte d'Ivoire, and with the small parts that still exist after liberalization under the sway of corrupt leaders, Ivorian companies cannot compete. Credit is essential to create and to run businesses but the giant conglomerates have international guarantees that allow them to borrow at much more competitive rates.

Côte d'Ivoire exports most of its beans raw, since European and U.S. tariffs on processed foods are so much higher than those on raw commodities (tariffs that the “liberalized” countries such as Côte d'Ivoire are not allowed to apply on imports). But even the little bit of cocoa grinding that is done in Côte d'Ivoire, providing
manufacturing jobs, is shutting down as the giant cocoa companies monopolize the industry and move it to other countries.

How much of Côte d'Ivoire's corruption is because of international meddling and transnational monopolies, and how much is because of the devious activities of the Ivorian elites? A lot of people are on the take in Côte d'Ivoire, though global law and international institutions protect the corporations. The goose that lays the golden egg is being eviscerated by the greedy.

The hotel staff is aghast that a white woman would leave the premises after dark, but just after midnight, I take a taxi to an address in one of Abidjan's upscale neighbourhoods, where I am to meet with a few members of the Network. I know their names well, since they are in constant contact with each other and I've been talking with them, in France and Côte d'Ivoire, for some time. There is no front man anymore, as GAK was, to publicize their research, but that hasn't deterred them from continuing the work he started.

The members of the Network are black and white, African and European. But these days, all members feel equally threatened in Côte d'Ivoire, especially since so little has been done to find GAK's killers. The official investigation into Kieffer's disappearance is painfully slow, and possibly pointless, according to those who follow it closely. “Ramaël wants to know, but France does not,” says one man in reference to the French judge conducting the investigation. Ramaël is good, they all agree, but Côte d'Ivoire is not France, and it's doubtful he will ever get to the bottom of things.

Kieffer's friends are very disappointed in Canada as well, believing there was more the Canadian officials could have done to put pressure on the Ivorian government. France carries a lot of baggage as the former colonial power, but Canada has unique
abilities in Africa—if its diplomats knew how to use them. (Canadian officials insist they have done all within their power.)

“Guy-André was a fool,” one friend in the Network says abruptly. “He was drugged by his need to know everything. He would go to the bars where the
filière
hung out. He knew all their names and their addresses.” He hated capitalists, they tell me, which isn't surprising, given his personal politics. “But most of all,” one friend declares flatly, “he hated the power of money.”

The Network is trying to pick up where Kieffer left off, tracing all the swindles and suspicious deals. A lot of people wonder why they bother. “So what if they can find another person who's lined his pocket with $10,000!” a foreign businessman said to me one day. “They're not going to change anything. No one cares. Guy-André Kieffer lost his life for nothing.” But some kind of spell has been cast by Kieffer's obsession, perhaps not unlike the force field William Nevinson created more than a hundred years earlier. Maybe the cocoa
filière
will be exposed in Côte d'Ivoire as it was in São Tomé. Of course, then the big international cocoa companies will just move on to other countries, where they will start again.

Yet in this nocturnal conversation with the Network, I feel more and more drawn in to the circle, a reticent member of the secret sect. They pass me documents and feed me names and information, much of which is obscure. A swirl of intrigue envelops us, like the steamy, oppressive tropical air. The Network constantly reminds me about discretion, to be careful what I say and to whom, something Kieffer was incapable of doing.

“But how do I know when I've crossed the line?” I ask.

“You crossed it when you came to Côte d'Ivoire.”

L
EAVING THE CHAOS OF
B
ELIZE
C
ITY'S AIRPORT, WITH
its crush of tourists and ubiquitous billboards for Nestlé products, the tiny fifteen-seat twin-prop plane lifts off into the hazy tropical sunshine and turns south. The verdant jade green jungle clings to the slopes of the Mayan Mountains below, while on the far side of the plane the sparkling aquamarine of the Caribbean vanishes over a distant horizon. The shallow coastal waters of Belize, with the hemisphere's longest barrier reef, nourish an extraordinary universe of marine life: tropical fish, sea anemones, manatees. A scattering of limestone
cayes
and tiny islands are today a refuge for fishermen, as they once sheltered the ships of a more predatory breed long ago.

English buccaneers and pirates once hid out in these flashing bays and tropical lagoons, waiting to plunder the Spanish galleons departing the New World, their holds filled to overflowing with wealth stolen by conquistadors from the land and the people they discovered here. With no empire particularly interested in the swampy, forested territory from southern Yucatán to the “Mosquito Coast” of Nicaragua, it eventually became British Honduras. The region has been fully independent, and named Belize, since 1981.

Pirates ruled for years, but gradually British merchants discovered the potential in the area's natural resources: the logwood tree, used in making dyes for fabrics; mahogany for furniture; sugar; citrus fruit. British colonists moved over from Jamaica and set up thriving business enterprises.

In time, the Baymen, as they came to be known, lost the market for logwood—artificial dyes provided cheap alternatives to the rainforest product—so they pushed further into the interior in search of new sources of wealth, eventually settling the area and becoming the colonial overlords of an English-speaking outpost in a world dominated by Hispanics. National and linguistic differences notwithstanding, English overlords or Spanish, there was one common feature that defined the mercantile adventures in the New World: forced labour.

Africans, not Baymen, did the hard work in the most horrendous conditions imaginable. Much of low-lying Belize's jungles are insect-infested swamp; the lumber camps where the slaves lived were built on bogs. There was often not enough to eat. Countless thousands of Africans died of hunger and disease. Many committed suicide.

While Africans lost their lives providing mahogany for chairs and tables in Britain, the native Maya of Belize managed to avoid the British slave-drivers. For centuries they had successfully dodged the outsiders or, when confronted, managed to fight them off. Their knowledge of the difficult terrain, and of
bush-fighting tactics, served them well, and to this day they remain relatively independent people.

Since the time of Montezuma, this region has yielded some of the best cocoa beans in the Americas. Yet neither the Spanish nor the British seemed particularly interested in developing the potential for cocoa agriculture—lumbering was more lucrative. For hundreds of years, the Maya of Belize cultivated cocoa for trade only among themselves and for their own use. Women still prepare the traditional foaming hot-chili-and-spice cocoa drink that the Olmec passed on to them two thousand years ago, though they now create the bubbly top with the aid of the Spanish-style
molinillo
and not by pouring the liquid back and forth between jugs. The lush forests still produce a number of wild cocoa trees, just as they did before the conquistadors. But outsiders never seemed to notice the cocoa. Until recently.

After a few brief stops, the plane lands on the tar and gravel patchwork airstrip of Punta Gorda, the largest “city” in the south. It likely took Hernán Cortés many days to pass through these dense jungles when he was chasing his imperial dream, plunging through the alligator swamps and poisonous thickets, overcoming snakes and scorpions, not to mention the resistance of the proud and hostile Maya people, who would bow their heads to no intruder. Now there's air service and a (mostly) paved highway that extends all the way from Belize City, ending abruptly here, twenty kilometres from the Guatemalan border.

Punta Gorda, or PG, as local people affectionately call the sleepy settlement, is little more than a post office, a pier, a park with a clock tower that stopped keeping time long ago, a hospital and a smattering of small cafés and hotels for the few tourists who manage to penetrate this far. The tourist beaches and world-famous snorkelling destinations are in northern Belize. Visitors tend to avoid the swampy jungles of the south. The hardy few who come are interested in trekking into the bush to see Mayan
culture as it was, or to experience one of the last relatively pristine places on the planet. Many visitors are simply waiting for the next water taxi that will transport them to Guatemala.

Gregor Hargrove is a bit of an anomaly here. He lives and works in Punta Gorda but has no connection to tourism and not much to do with the other foreigners. His office is on the main drag of PG, in an L-shaped concrete building designed simply to keep the sun, wind and rain out. A few small windows and the door are always left open for ventilation, except during hurricane season, but this also means that the noise from the street overwhelms conversations on market days, when people from outlying villages pour in to the town in brightly coloured buses.