Thrillers and Suspense
The 2008/09 Ivorian cocoa season began five days late due to the reform efforts that are to weed out the corruption in the cocoa sector. The management committee that now runs the key cocoa sector institutions opened the season on Sunday and also set a new indicative farm gate price of CFA700 ($1.48) per kilogram for the next quarter, up from CFA500/kg during the past quarters.
Continue reading “Côte d’Ivoire Increases Cocoa Farm Gate Price”
Readers of this blog will remember my earlier post on the corruption in the Ivorian cocoa sector. Well documented in Carol Off’s book, the key institutions put in place after the 2000 liberalization of the cocoa sector (the BCC – Bourse du Café et du Cacao, the FDPCC – Fonds de Développement et de Promotion des Activités des Producteurs de Café et de Cacao – and the FRC – Fonds the Régulation et Control) were quickly turned into corrupt institutions that served to enrich a small elite surrounding president Laurent Gbagbo.
Continue reading “Côte d’Ivoire begins Cocoa Sector Cleanup”
I just read that the South African company Chocolates by Tomes will begin making their own chocolate exclusively from African ingredients. According to an article at iAfrica.com, the company had previously imported its chocolate from Barry Callebaut but decided to begin its own production using cocoa from Ghana and the Côte d’Ivoire, vanilla from Madagascar and sugar and milk powder from South Africa. That’s a great development and I applaud Chocolatier Richard Tomes for taking this step.
Last week several news outlets (Agence France Press and Bloomberg, among others) reported that 23 officials related to the cocoa sector in the Côte d’Ivoire had been arrested on charges of fraud and corruption. Among the individuals arrested was Lucien Tape Do, the head of the Bourse du Café et du Cacao, the key Ivorian cocoa agency. Other suspects worked for the FDPCC – Fonds de Développement et de Promotion des Activités des Producteurs de Café et de Cacao – and the FRC – Fonds the Régulation et Control. Continue reading “A Cocoa Clean-up in the Côte d’Ivoire?”
I am very disappointed but I should have expected it. Yesterday, in a joint statement with the Chocolate Industry, Senator Harkin and Congressman Engel basically ratified the very limited efforts of the industry to combat child labor in the cocoa sector. So, for all practical purposes, the crucial part of the 2001 Harkin-Engel protocol, that the industry establish a “credible, mutually acceptable, voluntary, industry-wide standards of public certification, consistent with applicable federal law, that cocoa beans and their derivative products have been grown and/or processed without any of the worst forms of child labor” is dead. Continue reading “A Sad Day for the Children of Cocoa Farmers”
