Bitter Chocolate (41 page)

In the late 1980s, USAID and the conservative Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), a sub-agency of USAID, joined forces with Hershey and the Belizean Department of Agriculture to launch the Accelerated Cocoa Project, a program to push more farmers into hybrid tree production faster. Documents and transcripts from an extensive three-day conference in Belize in 1988 reveal the degree to which the big players were sugar-coating the commercial possibilities in the cocoa industry. The event was billed as the first Belize National Cocoa Forum, and it was convened in the capital, Belmopan, to discuss “the problems and opportunities” in the cocoa industry. All the players were there: Hershey; the foreign aid agencies (the event
was funded by USAID); the government, including the prime minister; and the farmers. Given the promises and commitments offered at the forum, the Toledo Cacao Growers, who were present, must have come away feeling quite hopeful.

The highlight of the event was an apparent corporate and government commitment to Belizean farmers. The record shows that, throughout the conference, Hummingbird Hershey made it clear it would purchase “all cocoa produced in Belize” and would pay $1.70 a pound for properly fermented and dried beans. Attempts to secure a commitment from Hershey that this was a guaranteed price were brushed aside. The company promised it would always pay the market price for all the beans and since worldwide demand for cocoa was increasing and Hershey's demand for cocoa was not about to decrease, there was nothing to worry about. At least, not in the sunny atmosphere of the cocoa forum.

The Belizean minister of agriculture took the podium at one point to reassure farmers that, while prices for cocoa may have been in a slump at the time, there was “no need for despair.” With Hershey's guarantee, and the quality of Belizean cocoa, what could go wrong? The only hope for success for the time being, said the minister, was to change local farming practices and implement the accelerated cocoa project Hershey and its financial backers recommended. The farmers “must plant the improved hybrid varieties and apply the recommended cultural practices,” he told them. Father knows best.

A Belizean government representative eventually took the stage to announce the most tantalizing tid-bit: Belize was negotiating a US$20 million loan with the World Bank in order to transform the rainforests of the country into productive cocoa farms. With two of the most influential agencies in the world onside and convinced of the wisdom of the cocoa project, no Toledo farmer was in a position to argue.

Of course, the dream could be realized only if the farmers did their part, and that meant they would have to borrow—a lot. The
Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a Belizean government agency that provides credit to entrepreneurs, was standing by to provide the financing but only under certain conditions: every farmer would have to spend at least three days at Hummingbird Hershey being trained in the new farming methods; the farmers would have to offer their land and all their assets as collateral for loans; they would have to use the new hybrid stock, with its dependence on expensive chemicals (for the purchase of which they could borrow more money); and they would have to use crop husbandry policies that the international agencies recommended.

The problem for the Toledo Maya was that they had no collateral for loans because they didn't own their land as individuals. So the lending agencies provided “crop loans,” using other commodities from their collective farming operations, such as rice, as security, and they encouraged the Maya to acquire additional land outside their reserves so they would have new collateral for their loans (even though the farmers would have to borrow in order to buy this land). Interest rates were twelve per cent, a staggering figure for a government lending agency that was promoting economic development. But, according to the DFC, it was consistent with international lending rates.

For the accelerated cocoa production, the farmers would require chemicals such as the herbicide paraquat—dubbed by environmentalists as one of the “dirty dozen” of toxic agrochemicals—and U.S.–produced Roundup. Conference delegates questioned the environmental consequences of these advanced farming methods. One delegate, Erasmo Franklin, provided one of the few dissenting voices when he blurted out: “The Hummingbird landscape is being raped … the waterways are being polluted by pesticide and nitrates (fertilizers). It ends up being a risk/benefit thing. Do we die of hunger or put nitrites in our water?”

There was no answer.

Gordon Patterson, listed in the program as a Hershey scientist, urged the farmers to cultivate new markets for their cocoa—possibly a rhetorical device: “We encourage you to seek other buyers, to encourage a competitive market. It's the only way that you can convince yourself that you are getting a good deal from us.”

A government agriculture spokesman reassured the farmers they had nothing to worry about. “Cherish the guaranteed market with Hummingbird Hershey!” said Albert Williams. “If the projections made by the World Bank prove to be true, Belize has a good future in cocoa.”

The Toledo farmers were hugely in debt by the time their Hershey hybrid
Theobroma
was ready for harvest in the early 1990s. U.S. government agencies were long gone by then, leaving the farmers to work out the details of their relationship with their corporate customer. It's possible that some of the people who created Hummingbird Hershey genuinely thought they were offering an economic gift to southern Belize. Plant scientists and agronomists had worked closely with the farmers to grow new trees and to increase the yields. But there is no one left today to explain what they were trying to accomplish, or if any of them knew that predictions of an upturn in cocoa profits were absurd.

Hummingbird Hershey was willing to fulfill its commitment to buy all the beans Belize could produce for “market prices.” In 1988, when the company made its promises to a room full of producers in Belmopan, it was offering $1.70 a pound. The price soon dropped to $1.25 in the early 1990s, then to $0.90, then to $0.70. When Hershey was willing to pay no more than $0.55 a pound in 1993, the farmers realized they were sunk. “It no longer made sense even to harvest the crop,” says Mayan farmer Justino Chiac of the TCGA. The farmers simply left the cocoa in the fields to rot.

Their obligations weren't so easy to dispose of. All the loans were coming due now that the trees had reached maturity, but with the collapse in prices no one had money to repay their debts. The Maya left home in search of work, picking citrus or sugar cane, in order to finance their payments. They lost land, savings and whatever was left of their faith in international agencies and cocoa companies. By 1993, the TCGA was bankrupt. And the dream of escaping poverty through the miracle crop that their ancestors had farmed two thousand years before was shattered.

Enter Green & Black's.

Craig Sams is a leader in the fastest-growing sector of packaged foods in the world—organics. Riding the wave of consumers obsessed with an antiglobalization, small-is-beautiful ethos, Sams scours the world from his home base of Hastings in southeastern England, looking for new products to sell to the “green”-minded consumer. In 1987 while travelling in southern Belize, he had come across small numbers of indigenous farmers who still cultivated native-grown Criollo cocoa trees with the methods they inherited from the Olmec three millennia ago—no fertilizers or pesticides, a cover of rainforest trees overhead and organic mulch around the base. All of this tradition was consistent with what the developed world now calls organic, for which consumers are willing to pay a premium price. Sams made some notes in his diary for later consideration. Mayan cocoa was not only ecologically encouraging, but also had enormous commercial potential. Rainforest products, in particular, have a special cachet for the ethical consumer.

Craig Sams is a sixty-something American-born Englishman and a pioneer of the macrobiotic food industry. He opened one of the first organic foods restaurants in London and started one of the earliest natural food stores, selling ginseng, miso and aduki
beans to a growing market of health food addicts. In the 1970s, Sams and his brother launched their Whole Earth brand, starting with simple brown rice and eventually extending to a line of sugar-free organic cola, peanut butter, tomato-free spaghetti sauce, baked beans and bread.

Most of the food revolutionaries of the flower-power generation had grown up on a diet of canned vegetables, cheese slices, white bread sandwiches and marshmallow jelly moulds, all made from products processed in the factories of big agribusiness. Their revolt was against industrialized corporate agriculture and the pesticide-laden nutrient-depleted diet that most people consumed in the post-war years.

Sams had been an advocate of the counterculture since his youth, but he was also a shrewd businessman with a flair for publicity and an uncanny knack for marketing to the food obsessed. Soon he had his organic brand in the major grocery store chains of Great Britain, where many traditional customers hadn't quite fathomed oregano and chili powder, let alone sea salt and kelp. Sams was often ahead of the latest food trend, baking whole wheat bread and making fruit juice–sweetened jams just as the mainstream medical world began to warn that a diet of white flour and refined sugar could give you stomach cancer, heart disease or, at the very least, chronic constipation.

Getting chocolate into the shopping baskets of nutrition-obsessed Birkenstock-wearers, however, took special skill.

It was Craig Sams's wife, Josephine Fairley, who pushed the idea of moving into the lucrative chocolate trade with an organic alternative. Her husband was reticent, since a large part of the Whole Earth marketing strategy was that their food was all sugar-free, except for the natural sweetness of fruit juices. “All our packaging boasted ‘no sugar added,'” says Sams, “so there was no way we could use this well-respected non-sugar brand for a product that was thirty per cent sugar.” But Fairley was convinced that they would be fools not to find a way to sell specialty organic
cocoa, given that chocolate was an obsession with so many people, particularly women, who are also the most likely to buy ethical products.

Fairley had sold her house when she married Sams in 1991. Now she invested her money in producing a new label under which they could market organic chocolate. Choosing a name was a challenge. “We dismissed the obvious ‘green' names such as Ecochoc, Biochoc, Nature's Choc or Chocorganico,” says Sams. They settled for one that resonated with establishment connections: Green & Black's. “It sounded like something that had been around for a long time and was resolutely English.” The name had green in it for the ecologically minded, and black connoted the seventy per cent cocoa content the organic chocolate would have.

Finding a source of organic chocolate was much more difficult. Throughout the world, the hyper-productivity of mass-market cocoa meant there was hardly a tree standing that had not been raised on a diet of synthetic fertilizers and protected from disease by regular showers of toxic pesticides. To have a product certified organic requires adherence to very strict criteria for cultivation—basically, zero synthetic chemical input in the production process.

Green & Black's lucked out in Togo, where the French government was funding a pilot project for chemical-free cocoa trees in its former colony. Togo is a narrow slice of a country, sandwiched between Ghana and Benin on the Bay of Guinea. It had been the fiefdom of assorted military dictators since the days when Craig Sams was first selling tofu to London's hippies. The French eco-project was a guilt-ridden effort to try to reverse some of the environmental degradation from colonization, and the project was run well enough for Green & Black's to win it the blessing of the rigorous British Soil Association (the agency that verifies organic standards in the United Kingdom).

In 1991, Green & Black's organic seventy-per-cent-cocoa chocolate bar started rolling off the assembly line at a factory in
France, where high-end chocolate is a specialty. The product was an instant hit, and Sams soon had his bars in major supermarket chains as well as at the high-end gourmet chocolate counters at Harvey Nichols and Harrods. Green & Black's played the ethical card to the hilt, putting out the message that it was paying a premium price for the cocoa beans while allowing African farmers a chemical-free environment. The company won the Ethical Consumers Award and got support from the Women's Environmental Network by claiming that Togolese matriarchs were the main beneficiaries. A headline in the
Independent
stated: “Right On!—And It Tastes Good, Too.”