Thrillers and Suspense
It’s the age old story that pits local processors against exporters. The Indonesian Cocoa Processing Association can’t get enough cocoa to keeps its members busy. Global demand (and global prices) are diverting local cocoa away from the processors. So they want 5 percent export tax on cocoa to provide an incentive for cocoa producers to sell their beans locally.
Continue reading “Indonesia Contemplates Export Tax on Cocoa”
After promising to source fairtrade beans for its flagship Dairy Milk bar, Cadbury made good. On July 21, the first Fairtrade Dairy Milk bars started coming off the production line in Bourneville. Within days, these bars will appear in shops all over the UK and Ireland. It’s the first time that a mainstream chocolate brand has switched to fairtrade.
Cocoa news just keeps getting worse. After a less than stellar production for the main season in Africa, several predictions claim that future output will also be lower than expected.
India and China are to the chocolate industry what emerging markets were to the financial speculators of the late 1990s. A promise of untold riches to any company that got its feet into the door. The new middle classes, so the theory went, are eager to adopt western tastes and, with it, chocolate. The dream of 100 million Indians eating Mars or Nestlé was a powerful lure.
The International Cocoa Organization just issued a report decreasing Indonesia’s prospective cocoa harvest for 2007/08 by 90,000 tons. Indonesia exported 530,000 tons of cocoa during for 2006/07 and the ICCO had projected exports to reach 570,000 tons this season.The current export volume is estimated to reach 480,000 tons.
