Eat More Chocolate and Reduce Poverty
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
by Eric Boa
Chocolate has never been more expensive to buy in the UK. Readers from further afield will also notice steep rises in the price of their favourite confectionery. The increases are bigger than you imagine because chocolate manufacturers are fond of shrinkflation. That 200g bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, the UK’s favourite, is now 180g. The sharp rise in the cost of chocolate has caught the attention of the press, but for reasons that are less to do with the fabled “cost of living crisis” and more about grand larceny.
What would you do if you were given the opportunity to rush round the aisles of a shop and attempt to gather as many goods as you could in a short time? And for free. This is what competitors in Supermarket Sweep, an American game show that began in the 1960s, were rewarded with. The time they were allotted was based on their ability to guess the prices of goods before they launched their trollies. The winner was the team that had the highest value of goods in their basket. Careful thought was given to the best strategy, considering that contestants were limited to how many items of a particular kind they could grab. No fancy bottles of wine or booze were allowed. The consensus was to go for expensive cuts of meat, big lumps of cheese, then large bottles of detergent and other high value cans of stuff. Such were the choices in 1960s USA.
Supermarket Sweep has been periodically revived and updated over the years. These days I’d stick with the chunks of meat and speciality cheeses and include olive oil. A much better indicator of what to grab would be to ask shoplifters. British ones have taken a particular shine to chocolate bars. One chain of shops in the West Midlands had £250,000 of chocolate stolen in 2025. No artificial limit for thieves on how many bars to steal. Swoop up fifty bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk and you’ve got a face value of over £200. A loss of £250,000 represents 60,000 bars – less if you include premium brands, but still a huge haul. Journalists love this sort of story, a welcome distraction at the end of a news bulletin dominated by wanton death and destruction in the Middle East.
Shoplifters are among the poorer members of society, but they are dishonest beneficiaries of major hikes in the cost of cacao, the main ingredient of chocolate bars. The real beneficiaries of pricier cacao are the millions of predominantly smallholder farmers who grow the stuff in over fifty countries. Cacao buyers do well out of this too, but they are a relatively small group of people and hardly poor.
The cacao tree, Theobroma cacao (food of the gods), originates from Central and South America. The biggest producers are however in West Africa, with Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana leading the way. The price of cacao beans was, until recently, relatively stable. There have always been sudden lurches in what is a key commodity for many countries, with reduced prices rarely getting much publicity. The dramatic increase in price began in 2024, a result of poor harvests in West Africa. From about 2000 to 2023 prices hovered just over $2000 per tonne, rising to $4000 in 2023 and then spiking at nearly $12,000 in late 2024. Diseases have also played their part in reducing yields though you’ll rarely read much about Swollen Shoot Virus or Witches’ Broom in the popular press.
Lately the price has fallen back to below $8000, still a substantial increase on two decades of stability in cacao trading markets. Good news for producers and sellers, though those with a long involvement in cacao will always have lingering worries that prices will collapse as more farmers plant cacao. It’s happened before. The inevitable lag from establishing a cacao garden – most producers are small-scale with tens rather than hundreds of hectares –is a worrisome time. It takes up to 10 years to achieve maximum yields, during which uncertainty on future prices will persist.
I worked briefly on cacao in Ecuador in 1998 and learnt about the fluctuating fortunes of cacao producers. A century earlier, in the 1890s, Ecuador was the global leader, a source of untold wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. One of the wilder examples of excess was sending your laundry to Paris to be cleaned. More importantly, cacao wealth financed Simon Bolívar and his revolutionaries. Then came collapse as cacao production was globalised and Ecuador fell behind.
In 2004 I visited another cacao growing area that straddled the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The trip was sponsored by Mars, a big buyer of cacao beans, keen to support an attempt to revive production in an area with huge potential but significant drawbacks.
There was a strong demand for high quality cacao, which even if difficult to confirm absolutely, sparked the imagination of Philip Betts, an intrepid expatriate who’d begun his career in coffee. He had confidence and faith in local farmers, believing they were interested in improving yields and expanding production. But they needed support. Philip was head of Esco Kivu, a business which provided training, processing, quality control and certification for cacao farmers.
I flew with Paula, my colleague, and Philip into Bundibugyo, a small town at the northern edge of the Ruwenzori Mountains. We toured cacao gardens then flew on to Kasese further south, still in Uganda, before driving to Beni in DR Congo. What began for me as a short study of a cacao disease in 2004 turned into a thrilling longer- term engagement with Esco Kivu staff and farmers. I witnessed an astonishing burgeoning of cacao production in the northern part of North Kivu, where Esco are active. It was here that Philip created and nurtured a team of field assistants, administrative staff and built all the accompanying machinery, processing and storage facilities needed to establish DR Congo and mark it today as a significant cacao producer.
The hard graft and resilience needed to overcome multiple and persistent barriers has finally paid off, though no one is relaxing. It will never be easy to sustain production in a region beset with political problems and constant chicanery. Lorries are an easy target for border staff and navigating the 1600km from Beni via Uganda and Kenya to Mombasa is hard work. This is where the cacao is exported to buyers in Europe and the United States.
The main challenges, though, are how to nurture farmers, the independent producers who Esco Kivu invest in. How to ensure they meet the exacting standards of organisations who set standards of care for managing cacao gardens. Lengthy documents detail what is expected. These cover pesticide use, child labour, remuneration, the working conditions of Esco staff, and taking care of surrounding forests. Esco Kivu pays for the yearly inspections by visiting teams hired by Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance (two leading certifiers) to monitor adherence to standards. The expectation is that certified cacao will lead to higher prices and profit, but ultimately there’s no guarantee.
Twenty-two years on from my first visit I never cease to be astonished at what has been achieved by a privately-owned company, and without the support of aid organisations. Esco Kivu has over 50,000 registered farmers with an estimated 250,000 dependents – probably more. Beni has been transformed. The throng of motorbikes, ubiquity of mobile phones and expansion of commerce are all directly linked to the flourishing of cacao production. Problems persist, yet I perceive a rise in confidence that seems to strengthen communities that have seen the worst of times. Coffee was once the dominant crop in North Kivu but was wiped out by Coffee Wilt, a fungal disease. Cacao has provided a more than adequate replacement crop. Yet roaming militias and left-over groups from a complicated history of regional conflict continue to threaten security and undermine optimism about a better future. Cacao depots are disrupted and couriers who have to deliver money to pay farmers are robbed. Civil society remains weak and shady traders smuggle cacao across the border to Uganda.
It’s always wise to be cautious about progress, but too often we become pessimistic and forget the resilience of people and societies thought to be weak and liable to fracture. My last visit to Kivu was in 2017. The internet has continued to become more widely accessible and mobile phone reception more reliable. At one time you had to be in line of sight of the mobile mast perched on top of a hill in nearby Uganda. Brasimba, a beer producer, built a factory just outside Beni and continues to be a big local employer. It’s not just Esco Kivu who have increased wealth and better living for people. There are other valuable crops, such as vanilla, papain (from papaya) and cinchona. But Esco Kivu has led the way, stayed firm and risked a lot when others would have given up. The success of cacao continues, and all because farmers have been given the encouragement and support that has allowed them to invest and commit to a profitable crop.
All you have to do is keep on eating chocolate.
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