Chapter 6

THE CHOCOLATE COAST

As I sped down a jungle road at the edge of a West African rebellion, I caught a glimpse of twisted, lichen-blotched branches poking out from under a canopy of leafy hardwoods, banana and kola nut trees crowded in among them. Tangled vines on the ground gave the impression of virgin rain forest. No sign or structure suggested otherwise. But it is hard to miss a cacao plantation.

My discovery was no accident. I had gone to Ivory Coast to find out what war might do to the world’s principal cacao crop. Fine chocolate depends mostly on pampered beans from small-production plantations in South America and Madagascar. But that was a small part of the picture. The big factories, like Hershey, consume nearly a million tons a year of forastero from West Africa’s chocolate coast.

Not far from Yamoussoukro, about ninety miles north of Abidjan, a narrow dirt track took me to a clearing flanked by a ramshackle hut. Léopold Ouegnin emerged to see who had come to call. At forty-two, with a tall hulking frame and a limp, he looked like a gentle boxer who had had enough of the ring. He wore faded shorts and the remains of a football jersey. Unperturbed by the surprise visit, he sat me down under a straw lean-to for a palaver.

We spent the afternoon together, but a quick glance around revealed a single image that said it all:

Back in the trees, a ’57 Chevrolet sat on blocks in the sun next to a ’56 Rambler. Rust had eaten gaping holes in each. Both were gutted, with snarls of wires where the engines had been. A charcoal brazier had replaced the backseat of the Rambler, and chickens squatted in the Chevy. When Ouegnin’s father grew cacao in the late 1950s, a single good year could buy you a Detroit sedan with a radio, whitewall tires, and all. In 2002, Ouegnin had a bumper crop. The world price was higher than it had been in decades. And he would at least earn enough to replace the broken straps on his clapped-out leather sandals.

Since this was Ivory Coast, the source of nearly half of the world’s cacao, that seemed an alarming state of affairs.

In the best of circumstances, an Ivorian cacao farmer is lucky to earn one-hundredth of the price per pound that the chocolate in his beans eventually fetches from retail shoppers at the highest end of the line. When he is stuck in a remote jungle at the mercy of rapacious middlemen and a corrupt class of civil servants eager for their own taste of the government’s cut, this gulf widens considerably.

Damned bad luck had dumped a civil war at Ouegnin’s doorstep on October 1, by coincidence the first official day of the cacao harvest. Seasonal workers from neighboring Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta) were scared off by antiforeigner diatribes. Even where farmers picked their own cacao, few truckers were prepared to risk roadblocks to collect it. On top of all this, the chaos of African revolution had shut down banks, and no buyers had cash to pay for sacks of beans.

But it was always something. The small producers who grow most of the national crop have suffered decades of exploitation. They depend upon Lebanese brokers and giant multinationals to carry their cacao to a tough world market of which few have much understanding, let alone any control. And worse, price policy is set by intermediaries who manage to pocket a substantial cut without doing much of the work.

Ouegnin detailed his woes with the stoic air of a man used to annual disappointment.

“Sometimes we do all right,” he said, politely skipping over the financial details. “All right,” I was able to determine, meant he could pay his bills, buy a few essentials, and send money to relatives who looked after his kids in school at Bouaké, a hundred miles to the north. “And sometimes we have trouble.”

Ouegnin spoke the perfect, mellifluous French he had learned in school and as a professional soldier in an army that sent its officers to military academies in France. As a youth, he had had no intention of growing cacao.

“When my father died, I decided to come back here and take over the plantation,” he said. “Who else would do it? And really, it’s not such a bad life. We’re far from the city’s miseries. Who needs all that crime, traffic, craziness? When I go to Abidjan, I can’t wait to get away. Here, it’s always quiet and peaceful.”

Looking around his little compound, Ouegnin concluded, “After all, here you decide what you do with your day.”

Up to a point. Even without war in the neighborhood, he had little time for lounging in the bush. He owns 120 acres in all, 35 of which are planted with cacao. The rest are in coffee, another demanding crop. That comes to about twelve thousand cacao trees, each of which he knows personally. With no money for machine-driven equipment, and little with which to hire extra hands at harvest time, he barely keeps up by working six days each week, from first light to nightfall.

Cacao farming is hard enough on orderly plantations, where crews can work methodically, with some gasoline-powered help and facilities for drying the beans. For dirt-poor African farmers, conditions range from primitive to prehistoric.

Not that Ouegnin was complaining. The plantation seemed to amuse his philosopher’s soul. As he trotted through the underbrush in his broken leather flip-flops, for instance, he chuckled when I asked about snakes.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “we have them all. Green mambas, black mambas, the Gaboon viper.” Either mamba is deadly, but that particular viper’s bite is enough to kill a man before he could find his car keys, even if his car had an engine. Or if a doctor lived anywhere within reach.

“We keep some herbs around that are supposed to be good for snakebites,” Ouegnin said, chuckling again as though he was not overly convinced. “You can buy serum to counteract snakebite, but who can afford that? It’s cheaper to watch where you step.”

I didn’t have to ask about the mosquitoes that dive-bombed us as we walked. Eradication programs had all but collapsed, especially deep in the bush, where efforts were only spotty in the best of times. Now, virulent strains of cerebral malaria are endemic in Ivorian cacao country. Visitors can slop on repellent and take preventive antimalarial drugs. Africans, however, either get by on their low-grade immunity or die early.

Most of Ouegnin’s trees, planted by his father, have reached their forty-year limit. He spends much of his time cutting shoots and nurturing young plants to replace trees he must uproot. In a country short of agricultural extension agents, his prodigious knowledge came the hard way. But it has its gaps. He grows two types of forasrero varietals, which he refers to as “the Ghana tree” and “the other kind.”

We stopped by an other kind, which Ouegnin had begun to harvest. He whacked open a yellow-orange pod so I could sample the juicy white pulp inside. It was as sweet and delicate as an Indonesian mangosteen, which is up there with black truffles and sevruga caviar as a taste for which I’d be tempted to sell my soul. I could see why marauding monkeys and bush rats could be a worse scourge to cacao growers than armed rebels.

Cacao trees produce pods all year long. Each takes six months to develop from a small white flower that sprouts on trunks and branches. On the West African coast, pods ripen in greatest numbers late in the year. The Ivorian harvest season starts on October 1, with a smaller advance crop. Work builds to a final flurry in early spring.

Ripe pods are sliced off with a sharp steel hook on a pole and are gathered in waist-high stacks. Within a few days afterward, each pod is cut open with a careful whack of the machete. If any of the forty or so beans inside is damaged, the whole batch could go bad. The beans and their sticky mucilage are then piled on banana leaves, which are lashed into an airtight bundle.

For six days or so, the tightly wrapped beans ferment. This process not only kills the tiny embryo in each bean but also begins the fermentation process that produces the flavor of cacao. When the banana-leaf bundles are unwrapped, the beans are a pinkish tan, with all of the mucilage dried away. Beans are then dried, and the fermentation stops.

Like nearly every other cacao farmer on the West African coast, Ouegnin dries his beans in the sun. He spreads them onto cement slabs in his compound, shooing away chickens and the neighbors’ toddlers to make room.

Depending upon the weather, beans dry in six to nine days. By then, they are dark tan. Their moisture content has dropped from 70 percent to below a government-decreed maximum of 7 percent. In a final step at the plantation, the beans are inspected and then poured into jute sacks to await the buyers’ truck. Sometimes farmers’ cooperatives pick up the crop. Ouegnin sells his to a Lebanese dealer.

In theory, the rains are over by October. But that, of course, is a notional concept. Every night, whatever the weather, Ouegnin scoops up his beans and stores them under cover, safe from early-morning dew if not a surprise overnight downpour. And every morning, he studies the sky to determine whether he will spread the beans out again for another day of drying.

These early stages are fundamental to the eventual taste of finished chocolate. However much alchemy goes into the complex processing chain, no one can make good chocolate from bad beans. A careless whack of the cacao hook can damage beans inside a pod and trigger a tainting spoilage. As with apples and olives, a bad one can ruin the lot.

Nothing suggests chocolate in Ouegnin’s jungle. The overriding aroma reminded me of my uncle’s general store in upstate Wisconsin, a wheaty scent of Purina animal chow. Rotting husks added a whiff of putrid sweetness.

Unlike most everyone else in cacao-growing country, Ouegnin had actually tasted chocolate. “It was about ten years ago, I think,” he said, trying hard to recall. “I had a piece of one of those chocolate bars made in Abidjan, in a blue wrapper. Pretty good. But we don’t much go for luxuries out here.”

It had occurred to me to bring a few Cadbury bars from a supermarket in Abidjan, but I thought better of it. Unless I also brought a portable refrigerator, they would have melted into a gooey mess by the time we reached the highway out of the city.

Driving back to town, I saw variations on the theme. Smaller producers simply spread their beans to dry on the edge of the tarmac, paying little attention to the black stains left by passing cars with leaky crankcases. If Ouegnin had built a life around his quality crop, others simply picked what they could in order to earn a few extra francs that would help them get through the year.

In the end, it really didn’t matter who grew good cacao, and who did not, in Ivory Coast. Most of the crop got bundled together in freighters for shipment to Europe or the United States. Some of the big players, like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, or Barry Callebaut, did some basic processing; they separated out cocoa butter and cocoa powder. One small company made finished chocolate.

But this was for the mass market, different from what international traders referred to as “flavor cocoa.” It was all about squeezing profit out of brute labor.

 

 

In 2001, the labor behind Ivorian cacao began to make headlines around the world. It started with a brief documentary on Britain’s Channel Four, produced by an independent company. A reporter interviewed boys as young as fourteen from Burkina Faso who had been taken by traffickers to Ivorian cacao plantations. At the end of the season, they said, they were refused pay.

In one piece of dramatic footage, a youth looked into the camera and said, “Whenever you eat chocolate, you are eating my flesh.”

A four-part series ran in the thirty-two Knight-Ridder newspapers in America and was circulated to several hundred other subscribers to the chain’s news service. The opening dispatch, by the Knight-Ridder reporters Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee, began:

“There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon.

“Slave labor.”

The series said that 43 percent of the world’s cacao came from Ivorian farms, and on some of them, “the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or tricked into slavery.” Despite nuanced connotations of the term “slavery,” the reporters were correct. But while the series mentioned “some” farms, it gave no indication of scale.

In a later article in India Today, the journalist Lavina Melwani, who knew both reporters, wrote:

“There are over 600,000 farms in the Ivory Coast, and the Knight-Ridder report found slavery on just four farms. Asked about this, Chatterjee says, ‘We are not scientists or data gatherers or researchers—we are reporters. It’s useful for the U.S. government and the chocolate industry to find out how widespread the problem is. Our role was to put a light on the problem that a lot of people were denying was going on.’”

As often happens in such cases, other newspaper and media reports quickly followed. Some gave unquestioning credence to vague estimates by international organizations. Many failed to note that indentured labor was even more common on coffee and cotton plantations.

The New York Times Magazine carried a heartrending story in February 2002: “Is Youssouf Male a Slave?” But editors had to follow it up with an embarrassed apology. The writer, Michael Finkel, admitted that Youssouf was a composite figure.

After the initial reports, journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post traveled together for a week as far into the cacao belt as they could hike. Neither found more than a handful of youngsters who might have been brought by smugglers. In their separate dispatches, they concluded that the stories about child slavery were exaggerated.

Léopold Ouegnin had missed the details, but he knew of the furor over “the chocolate slaves” in Ivory Coast. Most alleged abuses were far to the west in the cacao belt around the city of Man, so he had no firsthand knowledge either way. But he was dubious.

“A kid can’t do this sort of work, even if you want him to,” he said. “I guess you can put him to work clearing brush and carrying things around, but growing cacao takes strength and size and experience. It is no different from anything else in the African bush. Children and old people help their families with the chores. Everyone does something if he can. But slavery?”

The disputed facts had no effect in dampening down reaction in the United States and Europe. Stinging rebukes from international organizations brought calls for a boycott of Ivorian cacao. One world-saving organization got so carried away that it announced on its Web site that 40 percent of the world’s chocolate—that is, all the Ivorian cacao—was produced by child slaves.

Well-meaning activist organizations such as Global Exchange, a group of Americans who have performed admirable work, waged energetic campaigns against Ivorian cacao.

Governments issued statements. Trade groups took a stand. In a wired age, unchecked accounts flew around the Internet. One report of a report, relayed by Gambia Tourist Support, estimated that 90 percent of Ivorian plantations used slave labor.

The controversy was put into focus on May 31, 2002, in a Washington-dated Dow Jones dispatch by Elizabeth Price. It reported that the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) threatened legal action to require the U.S. government to consider a ban on cacao imports from Ivory Coast. In a letter to U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner, the ILRF demanded an official investigation and enforcement action under the 1997 Sanders Amendment to the U.S. Trade Act of 1930. This prohibited the import of products tainted by “forced or indentured child labor.”

The ILRF had dispatched an economist named Marx-Vilaire Aristide to Ivory Coast. After two weeks, he concluded, “Child slaves are used on cocoa plantations all over [the country] without any observable programs to stop the practice.” Aristide suggested the problem would be solved if large multinational processors offered to pay more for beans produced on farms certified free of indentured child labor.

Price added the other side of the argument, quoting Larry Graham, president of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association: “This petition is really counterproductive. There are 600,000 family farms in the Ivory Coast alone, and there is no evidence from anyone that [forced child labor] is going on in the vast majority of them.” Graham added, “The few farms out there who are abusing their workers will do so if the price is high or if the price is low.”

Price’s report concluded with a remark from Bama Athreya, the ILRF deputy director: “Whatever the Chocolate Manufacturers claim to be doing about this, we cannot leave a problem as serious as child slavery to voluntary private efforts, particularly when there is a federal law on the books to combat it.”

In August 2002, a broadcast by Mark Doyle, BBC’s Africa affairs analyst, began, “New research says that reports of children being traded as ‘cocoa slaves’ in West Africa have been heavily exaggerated.” He cited a detailed study by David Mobray of the respected International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. None of the more than two thousand child workers questioned said they had been forced to quit their homes.

I decided to look around for myself. Before leaving Paris, I asked a journalist friend from Burkina Faso, Habibou Bangre, to track down teenagers and young men who had just returned from Ivory Coast. Her range of interviews produced no dominant theme.

A seventeen-year-old named Adama worked for a cruel man who withheld water until the work was done. “I thought about leaving, but my employer blackmailed me,” he said. “He told me that if I left he wouldn’t give me the money I earned. At the end of the year, I was paid 500,000 CFA francs [about $2,000]. I could buy a bike and help my parents build their house.”

But Amaidou Sawadogo, now twenty-seven, would go back like a shot if the security situation improved. He and his brother have worked on Ivorian plantations for more than ten years, with kindly bosses who gave them extra food when they worked well. Now Sawadogo has his own small plantation.

For me, the question was settled in a morning-long chat with Dominique Kramo, a young Ivorian who coordinates Red Cross help for kids in trouble. He works from a tiny ill-equipped office in Abidjan, struggling to do something useful for an enormous population of youngsters whose survival depends on what they can cadge or steal.

In fact, Kramo said, along with a traditional movement from Mali and Burkina Faso, organized gangs now traffic workers to Ivorian plantations. Some are children sent by desperate parents. Demand is highest on cotton and coffee plantations, he said. As Ouegnin noted, cacao farming takes more skill.

“The answer is to attack the overall economic conditions so that everyone can live a better life,” Kramo told me. “I get crazy when I see outsiders who don’t understand anything use a simplified approach. What happens then is that people don’t buy Ivorian cacao, and the whole situation is worse for everyone, especially kids in a fragile position. We have enough problems as it is.”

 

 

The controversy is part of a far larger picture, a holdover from old European empires. France and Britain had each built a showpiece colony, side by side on the Gulf of Guinea. The French Ivory Coast was a wealthy expanse of plantations etched into rain forest and linked by all-weather roads to the glittering mini-Manhattan capital of Abidjan. The British Gold Coast was funkier. Accra, its capital, had the tin-sided, vine-choked feel of storybook Africa. But it also hummed with prosperity. Both had grown rich on cacao.

In the Gold Coast and Nigeria, Africans planted the first cacao plantations on their own initiative. In Ivory Coast, a French administrator handed out imported seed to farmers, but most resisted planting it. One early colonial report noted: “After much persuasion, they planted the seed, but such was their resentment at having to do so that they used to go out at night and pour hot water on it in the hope of killing it. Nevertheless, some of the seed survived and in due course cocoa became a popular crop.”

The Gold Coast was set free in 1957 as Ghana, in a blaze of new-Africa fervor. President Kwame Nkrumah erected monuments with pharaonic panache. He built a grand port and filled it with Soviet ships bartered for cacao. He scrapped the Westminster-style parliament that Britain left behind and squandered London’s other goodbye gift of a fat budget surplus. Nkrumah was soon overthrown. And over decades of military coups and thwarted elections, cacao plantations dwindled to a fraction of their former glory.

Ivory Coast was different. An upcountry paramedic with the title of doctor, Félix Houphouët-Boigny had a political party in place when Charles de Gaulle turned loose France’s African empire in 1960. Some leaders of former French colonies asserted their new independence, as Nkrumah did. Houphouët-Boigny kept a shadow cabinet of French advisers. His currency, the CFA franc, moved in lockstep with the French franc. French military bases and a sweeping defense treaty spared the leader the cost of an army.

Houphouët-Boigny was a pragmatic man. As long as he remained in the pocket of Paris, his own pockets swelled to bursting. Cacao, his country’s main crop, was good business. For years, Ivory Coast reflected light on the darkening continent around it. How could Africa be doomed with such a hopeful example?

Kids had their teeth fixed and went to school. A university turned out scientists and thinkers. French businessmen whisked up and down in air-conditioned elevators, each with fresh money or some new hustle for a fast-expanding economy. At night, Abidjan’s golden youth joined European tourists for starlit dinners by the lake-sized pool of the Hotel Ivoire. In poor parts of town, people ate spicy fish grilled at countless maquis, open-air restaurants. Dance clubs, awash in beer, throbbed until dawn. This was what people meant by “developing country.”

But Houphouët-Boigny, obsessed with grandeur, seemed determined never to die. Rather than name a successor, he diverted yet more money from Ivorian cacao receipts and dwindling French aid. By the time he actually did stop breathing in 1993, well into his eighties, he had squandered millions on a tragicomic monument to himself.

The president’s native village of Yamoussoukro is today still a village. But now it has a basilica with a marbled cupola that dwarfs the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. Gone gray in the tropics, it is nonetheless an emblematic white elephant to replace the long-gone pachyderms whose tusks gave the country its name. Four-lane freeways to nowhere, brightly illuminated at night, bisect virgin jungle and a few patches of squalid homes. Rooms stay empty in the towering hotel that InterContinental dropped from its chain. Few golfers brave the heavy hot air to play on its world-class course.

At the center of Yamoussoukro, a fortified fence, miles long, surrounds Houphouët-Boigny’s palace and tomb near the old family compound. And in a greenish black moat, several hundred crocodiles of mystical repute guard the memory of Ivory Coast’s aged king of cacao.

Fittingly enough, Yamoussoukro was where I went to cover the war. Ivorians were stunned that their peaceable approach to life had collapsed into bloodshed. But looking back, that seemed the predictable chain of events.

From the beginning, Ivory Coast imported labor to make the miracle work. Like most of Africa, the country was carved artificially from a patchwork of historic ethnic homeland boundaries, with frontiers dividing some tribes in two. Baoules and Betes from the south were the dominant ethnic groups. In the north, Djoula and Fulani spilled over from Burkina Faso and Mali.

The new constitution granted enough rights to citizens to establish a ruling class. Tribal preferences and personal ties did the rest. Soon many young Ivorians delighted in a common boast: We don’t like to work all that hard; we’re an intellectual people.

Over the years, people traveled easily across borders and worked wherever they were needed. When it was time to harvest cacao or coffee or cotton, migrant laborers streamed in and then returned home. Workers from countries to the north, as well as to the west and east, settled down as permanent residents. An accurate census would most likely show Ivorian-born inhabitants to be substantially outnumbered by people with roots in Mali and Burkina Faso.

By the time Houphouët-Boigny died, Ivory Coast was less of a country than a giant labor exchange with a privileged class defined by nationality. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, the old man had dealt simply with ethnic tensions: He banned any outward expression of them. But everyone knew what they felt inside.

As long as money came in to cover presidential checks, the lid stayed on. Cacao beans, however, can buy only so much splendor. Despite promising oil exploration offshore, Ivory Coast had nothing much to sell except what it grew. There was coffee. Palm oil, pineapples, and tropical flowers added something. The country also chopped down and sold most of its irreplaceable stands of tropical hardwoods, leaving soil erosion in their stead.

For serious looting, Houphouët-Boigny relied on French aid. Among other arrangements, a time-honored ritual ended each fiscal year: Ivory Coast came up short; the Élysée Palace wrote a check. The president also tapped private businesses wishing to operate in his patch.

A successor, Henri Konan Bédié, struggled to carry on the Ivorian Miracle. But France, adapting itself to a broader Europe and a different world, was losing interest in its former colonies. Other foreign donors curtailed aid. Too much of the money was disappearing into Ivorian cabinet ministers’ bank accounts while the country slipped steadily backward. Bédié was overthrown on Christmas Eve, 1999. General Robert Guei, the coup leader, organized a rigged election, which he managed to lose. Laurent Gbagbo, who won, set about trying to rebuild Ivory Coast in his own image. It was not a very impressive image.

Gbagbo blatantly favored his own Baoule tribe and other southerners, alienating tribes in the north. In September 2002, he cashiered an army unit that had been Guei’s personal guard. This happened at a time when the wider world was dividing itself into religious camps. Although it was a secondary theme in Ivory Coast, outsiders stirring up trouble made much of an explosive fact: southerners were mostly Christian, if not animist; and northerners, by a large majority, were Muslim.

Just about anyone could have predicted what would happen next. Chinua Achebe captured the situation in the title of a novel he wrote forty years earlier in Nigeria, farther down the Chocolate Coast: Things Fall Apart.

 

 

Not long after I returned from my visit with Léopold Ouegnin, the child slavery business came up again. An Ivorian delegation of dozens was the biggest single presence at the 2002 Paris Salon du Chocolat. In a speech billed as a press conference, the minister of agriculture made an impassioned plea.

“You must help us to counter this slander which endangers our very livelihood,” he said. “If there is slavery in the Ivorian plantations, then you are looking at a former slave.” As a child, he explained, he worked on his parents’ plantation for no pay.

He also strayed into a puzzling discourse on lecithin in chocolate, which had no particular connection to Ivory Coast. But the minister said nothing about why Ouegnin killed himself with work and still came up short.

Ivory Coast had just implemented a new system of paying for raw cacao. Instead of having to accept an arbitrary price fixed by the state, growers could ask for rates based on the cocoa market in London. In theory, they would now benefit when international rates soared. In practice, they seemed worse off than ever. On the surface, it looked as though government officials were more interested in their own perks and prospects. The Paris salon was my chance to hear them out.

The agriculture minister was little help. His prepared speech referred often to Ivory Coast’s push for quality but said nothing about how anything would improve. Afterward, he answered my questions with polite generality.

At the Ivory Coast exhibit area, I found willowy women serving melted chocolate on bananas. Men in frayed straw hats played lively music. Answers were harder to find.

Finally, I cornered a grower who had strong government connections. It was early in the day, and the stand was otherwise deserted. After a few friendly questions, he got up and announced: “You are monopolizing my time.” In West Africa, this translates roughly to “Give me something if you want to talk to me.”

The Ivorians were beginning to baffle me. Half the Abidjan cacao hierarchy had flown to France to explain their position. The minister had pleaded for international understanding and for help in putting down the rebels. World prices were at unparalleled heights, and Ivory Coast had a bumper crop. Chocolatiers in Europe and America were suddenly willing to pay high premiums for quality. So what was going on?

On the salon’s last day, I was determined to find some explanation. I had joked around with the man in charge of a newly created government agency. His job was to see that growers got a good deal each season so that they would be eager to plant the next. I checked back every half hour, but he never showed up. Nor did any of the others. But what did I expect? It was a sunny Sunday in Paris.

 

 

In 2003, I returned to Ivory Coast to track down some answers. By then the rebellion had spread. Along with the original insurgents who seized Bouaké and then took over the north, two separate groups had formed in the west. Both took wide areas of territory near the Liberian border.

France had sent twenty-five hundred troops to protect its citizens and keep what was left of its showcase ex-colony from collapsing. A rebel unit tested them at the outset and suffered thirty dead in the ensuing skirmish. All sides agreed to fly to Paris for peace talks.

This time I drove west to the grubby little port of San Pedro, through which 20 percent of the world’s cacao is channeled each year. Houphouët-Boigny had built the port near a pristine stretch of lovely beach. A French couple run an attractive hotel on the water, but San Pedro is all business.

Trucks jolt down unpaved roads near the wharves, lurching over axle-breaking potholes. Halfhearted crews push containers around with forklifts. The wharf is big enough for two good-sized ships, but only one was in port, and no one seemed in a hurry to speed it on its way. The Ivorian army had set up positions in case rebels drove south. They exhibited no more zeal than the dockers.

The night I arrived, a kind local resident directed me to the Ivorian in charge of the Archer Daniels Midland processing operation. He was drinking beer with his pals. As I approached, he beamed as if a long-gone family member had walked back into his life. He had no idea who I was. That was simply African enthusiasm and good manners. When I announced my purpose, his smile lost several hundred watts. “I can say nothing about cacao, nothing,” he said, polite but final.

Before going to San Pedro, I had phoned an executive of Cargill, who seemed pleased at the idea of a book on chocolate. He gave me a phone number for the plant manager in San Pedro. When I called, the manager, a Lebanese, cut off my first sentence. “I can say nothing about cacao, nothing,” he said, nowhere near polite but decidedly final.

In San Pedro, I was at the Cargill gate before 7 a.m. When I dropped the manager’s name, a guard let me inside to wait. The plant was simple enough, with a three-story tin-sided tower where workers processed cacao, separating cocoa butter from the beans and making powder from the remaining nibs. It was nothing to write home about. The manager arrived minutes later.

“I’m not going to lose my job for you,” he said. This seemed a reasonable enough position, but I reminded him that his boss had sent me to him. “That is not my boss,” he said. “You have to ask Mr. Winter.”

The conversation did not improve. Finally he said, “If you want to learn about cacao, go into the bush and find someone who grows it.” Then he popped the clutch and shot through the open gate.

That, of course, was the problem. I had found someone who grew cacao and, in far more gentle terms, he had explained that he was starving to death because of all the men in the middle who made money that never managed to reach the bush. The reality was more complex, I knew. But what was it?

The next step, I decided, would be the Bourse de Cacao et Café (BCC). In French, the word bourse suggests a commodities market. But this one does not work that way. Instead, according to economic reporters who cover it, it is an elaborate and mysterious organization designed to suck money from the cacao business.

My only course, I knew, was to track down Tape Doh, a small man in a never-absent silly black hat, who was president of the BCC. Normally, he is in Abidjan. But French officials had organized weeks of peace talks in Paris. Since this meant a free trip to France, nearly fifty Ivorians connected to the cacao business had gone along for the ride. Doh and his entourage were among them.

I returned to Paris and learned that a journalists’ organization planned a press conference with Tape Doh and a coffee person. They would explain the rebellion’s impact on agricultural exports. Since I had to be in London at the same time, I dispatched a researcher. She would ask questions, make a tape, and set up an interview. Doh arrived an hour and forty-five minutes late, with two muscular cronies, and then dropped off to sleep. Reporters learned far more than they wanted to know about coffee. But my researcher got me Doh’s cell phone number.

After twenty-five tries, I reached Doh. We fixed a meeting for the next day at to a.m. His hotel was an hour away, and I started early. This was an important meeting. Hadn’t the agriculture minister pleaded with reporters to help Ivory Coast get through its crisis?

Doh had gone out shortly before I arrived, so I waited. At 10:30, the woman at the desk looked over with a smile. “You’re not alone,” she said before launching into an amusing account of how Ivorian cacao people seemed to do their business. Just in case Doh had an urgent emergency, I left a card. She must have forgotten to give it to him.

 

 

I had missed Doh’s non-press conference, in fact, because I was at the cocoa exchange in London. Or rather, I was calling on brokers. In New York, the exchange still uses open outcry, as at the Chicago commodities market, where grown men in funny-looking colored jackets scream their orders. London is computerized. Brokers at half a dozen companies buy and sell at their desks.

Cacao traders are a serious-minded bunch who all day long watch reality dance across their screens in hard numbers. Each year the London market buys and sells 26 million tons. In fact, the same 3 million or so actual tons are traded back and forth.

Brokers might enjoy a chocolac fondant at dinner, but this is business. They dismiss as “flavor cocoa” the good stuff for which a limited number of chocolatiers are ready to pay an above-market premium. They trade a commodity, like wheat or pork bellies. Nondescript as these traders may normally be, their business can make headlines.

In 2002, Anthony Ward of the trading firm Armajaro cornered 7 percent of the world market in cacao, correctly, and lucratively, predicting prices would soar. Prices hit an eighteen-year high late, near $2,500 a ton, when news from West Africa suggested a disappointing crop. Chocolate manufacturers had stayed out of the market when the prices doubled over 2001. But then they ran desperately short. Ward is now known as Chocolatefinger.

I sat down with one trader, a charming Frenchman of twenty-five years’ experience, who cut rapidly to the heart of it. As he showed me how futures traded, his eyes constantly followed fast-changing figures down a dozen rows. “Look,” he said at one point. “The spot price just jumped five dollars a ton.”

He made a face when I asked about the Bourse de Cacao et Café and selected a diplomatic word for it: “Opaque.” Like most of the Ivorian structure around it, he explained, its purpose was to feed off the system. The government provided farmers no subsidies or safety nets any more than it provided health care or pensions for factory workers.

Others in London, Abidjan, Paris, and Washington finally clarified the opacity. Ivory Coast’s much-vaunted shift from an officially fixed price to open market rates came about because World Bank experts argued that it would be fairer to farmers. In practice, however, bloodsuckers in the middle simply found a different vulnerable spot on the neck.

At this point along the trail, I had begun to evolve Rosenblum’s First Law of Chocolate: The more someone refuses to talk about what he does, the more he is likely to be involved in a lousy product. Applying the converse of this law, I resolved to look for people who were happy to talk about what they did.

In the end, I finished my Ivory Coast research with a different Doh. After the Paris peace talks, which collapsed before the participants got home to Africa, the three rebel groups held a joint conference. I was interested in the leader of MPIGO—the popular Ivorian Movement of the Great West, which was in the heart of the cacao belt. To protect his family, he had chosen a nom de guerre: Sergeant Felix Doh.

Considering how heatedly he denied links to Liberia across the Cavally River, it seemed strange he had picked a name so evocative of Sergeant Samuel Doe, the mercurial young man who overthrew Liberia’s president in 1980, plunging a peaceable country into murderous chaos.

The cacao crop was harvested and stored in warehouses, Sergeant Doh assured me. If successful negotiations dissolved the front lines, it could move quickly to ships at San Pedro. Farmers were eager to get back to business.

But things had already fallen apart. Paris newspapers carried front-page photos of women in tearful panic, cowering behind French troops who shielded them from rioters at the airport. Young Ivorians chanted at the departing French: “Go home and don’t come back.” Some would return, but Houphouët-Boigny’s miracle was over.

Later, Nianzou Ano, a senior aide to President Gbagbo, confirmed for me Felix Doh’s basic point: A huge amount of cacao was blocked in MPIGO territory. But Ano knew more about the business. Fighting had scared off small producers. Many had fled, and others were afraid to venture into their trees. The vital work of clearing and pruning was all but paralyzed. This portended future catastrophe.

Exactly as Ano had predicted, I saw months later, Ivory Coast’s cacao production had begun to drop dramatically. Of the 1.3 million tons expected for the season ending in 2004, the total dropped below a million. In many areas, barely a tenth of what was expected showed up at the ports. And things were getting worse.

Irreparable damage had already been done, and Felix Doh’s confidence seemed more like wishful thinking. Rebel administrators had priorities other than the complex business of storing and shipping cacao.

Meantime, “government-held territory” was not exactly under control. On the Cavally River, I had watched United Nations officials trying desperately to ferry Liberian refugees home after a decade of safety in Ivory Coast. Young Ivorians in fright wigs and Donald Duck masks, high on cannabis as well as newfound power, could torture or murder when the French were out of sight. If the situation was so bad that Liberians preferred their chances at home, peace was not likely to come any time soon.

Ivorian troops shot to death Jean Hélène, a reporter for Radio France International, in confused circumstances. Rebels killed two French soldiers. A peace agreement was once again falling apart.

I remembered when war shattered Sierra Leone, the diamond-studded country beyond Liberia along the West African coast. Suddenly Liberia, which has no diamonds, was a diamond exporter. It seemed as if Liberia, which produces almost no cacao, would appear mysteriously as an exporter of wayward beans. Then again, diamonds are forever. They can be shipped in a shirt pocket, no matter what mayhem rages around them. But as low-grade war settled in for a long stay in Ivory Coast, planters neglected their trees. Feeder roads were blocked, leaving harvested beans to spoil. Cacao, even Ivory Coast’s mediocre cacao, is far less accommodating to turmoil.

 

 

When the 2004 season ended, London traders were caught off guard. Ghanaian planters, sensing a new opportunity to sell their best cacao, harvested a bumper crop. Exports rose from 497,000 tons to 595,000 tons in a year. Intrepid Lebanese trucked out most of Ivory Coast’s cacao. The London price per ton dropped from a high of £1,503 in February 2003 to a low of £801 in March 2004.

But no one was betting heavily on the future.

In May, Rory Carroll of The Guardian reported on what he called the chocolate war around Broudoume, a microcosm of conflict across the cacao belt. Its causes were complex, but the result was clear: Indigenous Bete tribesmen attacked to take back plantations farmed by settlers from the north. Hundreds were killed, and thousands fled. Many of the Bete who moved in were inexperienced and unwilling to meet the trees’ demanding needs. Almost immediately, yields dropped.

Meantime, in Abidjan, the Paris agreements fell apart. Opposition parties held what they called a peaceful demonstration on March 25-Government forces ended it by shooting at least sixty. French reporters said hundreds more were shot and hacked to death over the following days in revenge killings.

After a resounding United Nations condemnation, 6,250 U.N. troops headed to Ivory Coast to reinforce French forces, already swollen to nearly 4,500. Paris editorialists did not miss the significance of the date. It was ten years after genocide in Rwanda.

As for the system to compensate hard-pressed growers, any substantial reform seemed less than likely.

On April 16, 2004, Guy-André Kieffer, a French-Canadian freelance journalist who specialized in cacao, was kidnapped in Abidjan. He had just written yet another expose on corruption in the cacao trade, this time about how government officials bought arms with export income meant for small-scale producers. In June, the Paris daily Libération devoted two pages to the missing Kieffer, referring to him in past tense.

“I’m getting sick of being a journalist,” Kieffer had written a friend early in 2001. “I want to take some action to reform the cacao network so that small planters can finally make some profit.” Later that year, the prime minister hired him to do just that. Only months later, after a ministerial shake-up, he was sacked.

Kieffer returned to journalism, using thinly veiled pseudonyms for his harsher attacks. He relied on good relations with Gbagbo for protection. Nonetheless, he sent his girlfriend home to Ghana for safety. Authorities threatened him with libel action. Finally, friends say, a wealthy Ivorian cacao czar offered him a substantial sum of money to find another topic. Kieffer turned it down.