A twofer. First up, Adam Tooze at his Chartbook substack, February 19:
Chartbook #196 The Closing of the Cocoa Frontier
This Valentines day, Americans gifted each other in the order of 58 million pounds of chocolate, much of it wrapped in 36 million heart-shaped boxes. It was a particularly busy period for the global chocolate industry, which in 2020 processed c. 5 million tons of cocoa beans into chocolate confectionary, generating around 130 billion dollars in revenue. The cocoa-chocolate business is an agro-industrial complex that has emerged from millennia of human ingenuity and entrepreneurship mixed with commerce, political power and violence. At the front end are well known chocolate brands, the likes of Cadbury, Mars, Lindt and so on. Behind them are the grinder-traders, giant agro-industrial trading corporations like Cargill. There would be no chocolate, however, without the cocoa beans and they are grown overwhelmingly on small peasant plantations, most no larger than 3 hectares, yielding 300-400 kg in beans per hectare and worked by c. 6 million farming families. Together with their families, perhaps 50 million people are directly involved in cocoa cultivation and processing, including many youths and children. A rough calculation suggests that the cocoa-farming dependent population worldwide outnumbers the entire farming population of the United States and Europe. At 14 million the main workforce on the cocoa farms significantly outnumbers the 9 million workers engaged in motor vehicle production worldwide.
Recently, Indonesia has emerged as a major grower. Both Central and South America, the original home of the cocoa bean, still contribute to global supplies. But 70 percent of the world’s cocoa beans come from West Africa and 60 percent from the farms of just two states, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire (CdI). In a year of good harvests, CdI with a yield of well over 2 million tons of beans, can account for 40 percent of the global production. De facto the global pyramid of chocolate confectionary balances on the peasant producers of Ghana and CdI who have been the drivers of a production revolution of huge scale.
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What first catches the eye about this supply chain are the spectacular hierarchies of power. For journalistic purposes and in NGO campaigns, these hierarchies are commonly dramatized in two clichés. The first is the contrast between the tiny peasant producer and the agro-industrial multinationals. The second is that between Western consumers of chocolate and child labourers in the cocoa plantations.
One piece of recent research by Staritz, Tröstere, Grumiller and Maile maps the global supply chain as follows:....
....MUCH MORE (he's just getting warmed up
And from History Today, March 3, 2022:
The introduction of chocolate to the Catholic world caused a dilemma: could it be eaten? Should it be given up for Lent?
....In 1636 an Inquisition lawyer, Antonio de León Pinela, rebutted Antolínez in a long tract entitled Questión Moral: ¿si el chocolate quebranta el ayuno eclesiástico? (The moral question: does chocolate break the fast or not?). But in 1645 Tomás Hurtado, who hailed from the relatively obscure new order of Clerics Regular Minor, wrote a further defence: Chocolate y tabaco; ayuno eclesiástico y natural (Chocolate and tobacco; the ecclesiastical and natural fast).
Eventually the Jesuits, who by this time had commercial interests in cacao production and distribution, took the case back to Rome. They secured a favourable ruling from no less an eminence than the theologian Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, who put his name to a 16-page opinion De Chocolatis potu (On the use of chocolate, 1664), which reaffirmed Hurtado’s arguments. The Jesuits published this immediately, reprinting it at least four times in the next decade....
....MUCH MORE