ABIDJAN (dpa) – A powerful, sweet aroma rises up from the plastic sack filled with cocoa beans. For the cocoa company Schokinag in the Ivory Coast metropolis of Abidjan, however, the mood is not so sweet because of rising prices.
Since last November, the brown pulver from the yellowish cocoa beans have become one-third dearer, even though Schokinag trader Christian Jacob is certain about one thing: “Experience shows that rising prices are short-lived.”This confidence on Jacob’s part is a matter of concern for the cocoa farmers of western Africa. They know that even this latest rise will not help the price of raw cocoa out of its long slump. And now, European Union regulations permitting processing with alternate ingredients in chocolate will make the crisis even worse.Since the end of the 1980s the price for the tropical commodity has gone steadily downwards. In the mid-1980s the average price per ton was 2,100 dollars. Today the level is at 1,000 dollars or even less.The cocoa growing countries of West Africa have suffered the worst from the plunging prices. Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon combined account for two-thirds of the world’s cocoa harvest. The Ivory Coast alone produces 40 per cent of the planet’s cocoa beans.In their desperation, the four countries in the past repeatedly threatened to take drastic action. Sometimes they threatened to burn or drop into the ocean tons of the beans in order to reduce the surplus and try to influence the market. But many business people opposed such ideas.One was Ayo Bakare, head of Ebun Industries, a cocoa-processing company in the Nigerian business metropolis Lagos. He regards the destruction of cocoa beans as not being a suitable method to be used in pricing strategy.“I don’t believe that the growers have seriously thought this through,” he said. “First there is the logistics problem. Just imagine the mountains of cocoa.”Beyond that, the destruction of cocoa would be difficult politically to explain in countries where many people live below the poverty line.More than 1,000 kilometres away from Bakare’s company, women’s cooperatives are making his business more difficult. They are processing shea-nuts into butter. Shea-butter has long been used in cosmetics, but now people in West Africa is using it for cooking.And now, shea-butter is threatening in part to push aside cocoa beans in the making of chocolate in Europe. The blame for this rests with the E.U., which a year and a half ago approved a regulation permitting chocolate producers to use non-cocoa fats for their products. This will become legally binding in August 2003.For more than 20 years now a dispute has been raging between the pure-chocolate and the mixed-chocolate camps. Till now, eight E.U. countries had banned using any substitute for cocoa butter in chocolate, while seven countries did permit this. The substitute is partially cheaper than cocoa.Under the new regulation, up to five per cent of the non-cocoa fats may be used in chocolate production in the E.U., without the products’ classification as chocolate being challenged. It was only last December that the European Court of Justice attorney general gave the regulation legal recognition.In a case now pending against Spain and Italy, which want to ban substitutes in chocolate, the court will probably – as it usually does in other cases – follow the attorney general’s recommendation.The International Cocoa Organisation in London is upset with the E.U. policy. It accuses the E.U. of being two-faced on the issue because Brussels has also signed an international cocoa declaration to push for growth in the cocoa market.The declaration in particular is targeted to cocoa exports from the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific nations. But the green light given by the E.U. to cocoa substitutes in chocolate could inflict a drop in earnings by cocoa producing countries of up to 750 million dollars a year, the ICO warns.
