You know all about Peak Oil. But are you ready for ... [cue ominous music] ... Peak Chocolate?
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We're sold out of chocolate croissants this evening. Please enjoy one of our complimentary orange croissants instead. They're just as good.
The world's chocolate supply appears to be steadily diminishing. There are a multitude of factors, of course, but the clear and alarming news is that production of chocolate has been lower than consumption, for some time now.
I shot this photo of pods on a tree around this time 2 years ago, in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. This is one of the chocolate growing areas of the world that, so far, appears to be doing well.
Who looked at these pods and thought "mmmm we can eat (or drink) that"?
The words for cacao and chocolate can be traced back to roots in the Aztec civilization. They brewed cacao beans into an unsweetened beverage they called xocoatl. The first reader to pronounce that correctly gets a free orange croissant. (We're overstocked. I'm trying). Consumption of chocolate in various forms goes back around 2000 years, though some research suggests we've been enjoying it for anywhere up to 4000 years. For much of the time span, that was mostly as a bitter drink, no sugar added.
The simplified version of chocolate production: Pods, which are really the fruit of the tree, take about 6 months to ripen. When you cut into one, you will find dark seeds, better known as cacao beans, surrounded by white pulp. The seeds are to be fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted. Then the shells are removed, and the inner chocolate nibs extracted. It's the nibs that give us the chocolate products, after being ground and separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter. The cocoa butter is the fat component. Carefully combined back into the solids in various proportions, you get solid chocolate. Add sugar and/or milk solids in proportions, and you end up with a range from bittersweet to milk chocolate.
So, what's going on, and why are we talking about a shortage?
An article from 2011 talks about Peak Chocolate, with 2014 being the year in which the supply of sustainable chocolate could run dry. Well here we are in 2014, and it hasn't run dry, but production is now less than consumption.
One factor is slave labour in Africa's Ivory Coast. Western African countries produce up to 2/3 of the world's annual chocolate supply, and much of that comes from the Ivory Coast. Children have often been used as slaves in chocolate production, under abusive conditions. As the world wakes up to these horrible practices, fair trade embargoes mean using less and less of the region's product. Further, extremely dry weather, and an outburst of fungal diseases, has reduced production significantly.
On top of that, there continues to be political unrest in the region. As the 2011 article explains:
Political unrest in the Ivory Coast, where 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown, has ‘significantly’ depleted the number of certified fair trade cocoa farmers.
Many have fled the West African country, while fair trade training programmes have also come to a halt.
The smart people in the rest of the world won't deal with non-fair trade producers, and the number of those is shrinking. Sustainability is affected, and prices for consumers rise.
While production is down in cacao growing regions, worldwide demand is growing. Growth of consumerism in China is accelerating this, as the Chinese, with increasing personal resources, have a taste for the good things in life. In every developed and developing country, people want more chocolate. And who wouldn't?
Chocolatiers offer advice to chocoholics on how to halt the cocoa shortage. It boils down to, basically: eat less of it. Yeah, that's going to work.
What's realistically ahead for chocolate lovers? Supply and demand apply here, as you might expect. The Deseret [sic] News summarizes the deficit in an article today:
How bad is it? Last year, the world ate about 70,000 metric tons more chocolate than was grown. Producers say the deficit could rise to 1 million metric tons by 2020.
It goes on to compare chocolate to oil: Peak Chocolate, as with Peak Oil, drive innovators to find new ways to produce. These innovators have given us nasty, filthy, environmentally disastrous Tar Sands oil. New ways to produce chocolate need not be so destructive. There are efforts, for example, to produce new strains of cacao that resist the fungus that is currently eating its way through some of the crops.
Chocolate prices at the consumer level seem destined to keep rising, at least for the forseeable future.
I say, enjoy it while you can. Because you can probably enjoy it for a long time, if your wallet is fat enough.
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November 18, 2014
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