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Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa
Di Órla Ryan
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Chocolate - the very word conjures up a hint of the forbidden and a taste of the decadent. Yet the story behind the chocolate bar is rarely one of luxury.
From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground.
Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it on to our supermarket shelves.
From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground.
Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it on to our supermarket shelves.
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereInformazioni sul libro
Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa
Di Órla Ryan
Descrizione
Chocolate - the very word conjures up a hint of the forbidden and a taste of the decadent. Yet the story behind the chocolate bar is rarely one of luxury.
From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground.
Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it on to our supermarket shelves.
From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground.
Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it on to our supermarket shelves.
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Recensioni
A thought-provoking look at Ghana and Ivory Coast, which produce about two-thirds of the world's supply of cocoa beans, and the contributions, both good and bad, that the cocoa industry makes to the lives of the people of those countries. Ryan goes beyond superficial impressions to show how the cocoa trade developed in these countries and how a lack of government accountability and investment have prevented the producers from reaping all the benefits from their role in the chocolate industry.
Rating: 4I think the strength of this book is that it introduces the reader to the complexity of the issue. Politics and poverty interlaced with human need, greed, and the rights of children are not easy issues and the problems are clearly not going to be solved by buying one particular brand of chocolate over another. Which leaves the reader with an uneasy feeling, particularly if they are supporters of the Fair Trade initiative. My criticism of the book lies with the writing, which is sometimes amateurish, surprising for a journalist with experience. Maybe the book form is not her strength. And Orla Ryan does not always present the facts and the examples clearly, resulting in confusion over what is happening and what the causes of the problems really are. However, it's good to have the information she has researched, and gives the reader something to think about. Perhaps the next book to read on the subject is Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate published by University of Queensland Press. Thanks very much to Zed Books for supplying the review copy.
Rating: 4I received this book as part of the LibraryThing early reviewers program. I'd heard a little bit about the chocolate trade and the issue of child labour and slave labour associated with it through worldvision and our unshackled group at church so I was pleased to be able to get a copy of this book written by a journalist with first hand experience in West Africa.Orla Ryan gives an excellent overview of the history of the chocolate trade and the politics and systems in these countries. As always power, the grabbing for and the holding onto, are a large motivation behind the injustices perpetrated in these countries. While fair-trade has been beneficial in some areas, the real answer in long term action and empowerment of the farmers who make a living growing chocolate. Highly recommended to gain further insight into a complex issue.
Rating: 4Orla Ryan's Chocolate Nations does a good job of exposing readers to the complexity of the issues surrounding the cocoa industry in West Africa. There is so much more involved than just saying yes to Fair Trade and no to Hershey. Most importantly, Ryan does not claim to have a solution to these problems, only the knowledge that any lasting solution will have to come from the nations themselves, not be imposed upon them.
Rating: 4Chocolate Nations, by journalist Orla Ryan, is an important book. It allows us to look at the wrapped chocolate bar that is not much more than an impulse buy at grocery stores across North America and trace it back to its beginnings on the cocoa tree in West Africa; we see the farmers and the poverty they live in, despite the billions made by chocolate companies worldwide; we see the child labour, slave labour, politics, greed; we see the land and the small holdings where the cocoa grows best, where farmers and soil alike would do better with a diverse crop but are encouraged to only grow cocoa. We learn that the cocoa industry is extremely complex if looked at closely and that it is too simplistic to just say buy fair trade and go no further. To Ryan's credit, she touches on all these issues (and more) and spent eight years doing it in a way that perhaps only a journalist could. In an odd way, this is also her downfall. In trying to present all viewpoints, I was left at the end certainly more knowledgeable but just as confused as when I started. And perhaps that's the point. The complexity of the situation demands that all of us---consumers, producers, politicians, farmers---come together to find the right solution. To that end, this book is a good start.
Rating: 4Nice insights of the plight of the average cocoa farmer from the world's top two producers of cocoa beans - Ghana and the Ivory Coast
Rating: 4I have an unusual problem with reviewing this book: It is so intensely thought-provoking I’m having trouble just telling you what’s actually in it. When I type, I start wildly drifting into my own tangents. Let me start with this, which I never knew before: Most of the world’s cocoa comes from Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and nearly all of it is cultivated by hand on small, family-operated farms. It is the last of the global crops to be cultivated this way, and it represents the largest portion of each country’s wealth. To buy chocolate – even those convenience-store staples from Hershey, Cadbury and Mars - is to directly connect with its harvesters in West Africa. After reading this book, I developed a respect and appreciation for the common Hershey’s bar that I had until now reserved for the produce at my local farmer’s market. Orla Ryan is a former Reuters reporter who covered the cocoa industry in Ghana and Ivory Coast before taking leave to publish this book. Because I feel a tangent coming on, I’ll be quick: This is an exceptionally readable, comprehensive, smart and objective book that smashes any assumptions you may have been making since I told you it was about poor African farmers harvesting most of the world’s chocolate with hand tools. I recommend it to anyone interested in journalism (for the way it presents information that I suspect will leave the farmers, consumers and chocolatiers feeling they have been portrayed fairly) business and commodities trading (for the way it analyzes a whole commodity market from the soil to the store) and social activism (for ideas in how to identify and implement policy changes that will actually reach the poor, as this author has tried to do). This book might even teach activists who have to communicate with business leaders (and vice versa) how to find common ground. And if you hate that guy from Coldplay, there's something in here for you, too.And now for the tangent that I cannot hold back any longer: Empowered consumers have been led to believe - especially by the coffee industry, which gets some treatment in this book - if they just buy a fairly traded product, they can be part of the solution to end poverty, child exploitation, and corrupt regimes hoarding resources from their hardworking and deeply impoverished citizens. Orla Ryan suggests the solution is not ours to purchase. Just like with sharecropping in the United States after slavery, money generated by the sale of those cocoa pods immediately gets distributed to the moneylenders, fertilizer suppliers and landowners to whom the farmer is indebted. “Cocoa money supports millions of people, not just those who work the farm but also many who have never harvested a pod.” Worse, this is a “cash crop” which (tangent!) is practically a misnomer: West Africans don’t eat chocolate, so they can’t sustain themselves with their own labor. Their money has to pay for all of the food they eat, since none of it comes from their own farm. No amount of money, even the $3 you just spent on that Dagoba bar at Whole Foods, is going to stay with the farmers and their families for long. The solution, Ryan suggests, is to teach farmers how to get the most out of their land by cutting down older, less fertile trees, diversifying their crops and fighting disease and pests more efficiently. The Westerners in the best position to provide farmers the resources and motivation to implement these wildly counter-intuitiive methods of wealth creation? Not the consumers - it's Mars, Cadbury and Hershey, the folks who get nearly 100% of the beans from Ghana and the Ivory coast into our mouths and whose business would collapse if something happened to the cocoa supply. The moral of the story: keep buying those Wonka bars, because Big Chocolate actually comes across in this book sounding fairly socially responsible, though not on a large-enough scale to have a positive impact on all of its farmers.But if anyone actually was able to wean the harvesters away from chocolate and into sustainable crops for their communities, there would probably be less chocolate grown overall. Prices would soar and chocolate bars would return to being a luxury rather than an essential element in my daily mental health regimen. By the end of the book, as Ryan alternated between staggering insights and brilliant suggestions for improving how chocolate is produced, I began to realize I need those chocolate farmers in Ghana more than they need me. The real price of humane chocolate may very well be one’s willingness to get by with less of it.
Rating: 5This is a comprehensive view of the chocolate industry, following the chain from African farmers to European consumers and explaining exactly why the cocoa farmers receive just 4% of the price of the average UK bar of milk chocolate. It's well written and well researched, mixing history with present-day politics to great effect, and illustrating it all with carefully chosen personal stories.I thought the chapter on Fairtrade was a little, well, unfair. Fairtrade gives a guaranteed fair minimum price to farmers, and Ryan shows how in practice this is not making much of a difference right now, because general prices have risen and so other buyers are offering similar prices. But surely this misses the point - of course farmers can do better when prices are high, but what happens when prices plunge? Ryan says herself that before Fairtrade was introduced, cocoa prices had collapsed and thousands of farmers were on the breadline. Surely the value of Fairtrade is not in competing with other buyers in good times, but in providing a guarantee of sustainable earnings in bad times. Also, what about the possibility that having a large block of Fairtrade buyers offering higher prices will contribute to higher market prices in general? I'm perfectly willing to accept that Fairtrade is not a guarantee of ethical purity and that some of the celebrity-driven publicity is overblown, but I thought some of the value of the scheme was overlooked.The other problem I had with the book was that the cover promised too much. The subtitle is "Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa" and the illustration is a cocoa pod packed with human skulls. On the back cover is a quote from Stephen Chan OBE saying that he "gave up eating chocolate years ago after seeing at first hand the exploitation that surrounds its production in Africa...It was about time a book like this was written."So I was expecting a devastating exposé, full of shocking injustices and quite a lot of death. This book doesn't really deliver that, which is good news for the African cocoa farmer of course. I ended up feeling quite relieved that the masses of skulls never really materialised. But also I felt a little cheated every time I finished another chapter about pricing regulations and looked back at the cover. A more accurate subtitle for this book would be "Chocolate Nations: a detailed survey of supply and demand for cocoa and its effect on West African farmers." Of course, nobody would buy the book then except for cocoa traders and academics, and therein lies the problem.I'm not saying that the book doesn't describe injustice - of course it does. What I'm saying is that, to me, it's not shocking. It's the same injustice that occurs in many other industries, the injustice of the rich using their power over the poor. Perhaps I should give up chocolate, but then I would also have to give up wearing shirts made from cotton, using a laptop containing coltan, and a lot of other stuff in which exploitation is inherent in the process by which raw materials make it from poor producers to me, the Western consumer. As George Orwell said 75 years ago, "Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream." While much has changed since then in political terms, with the dismantling of European empires and the establishment of independent governments, Orwell would find today's economic relations grimly recognisable from his own time. This book does a good job of explaining why, in a very fair and balanced way, without assigning much blame or suggesting many solutions. I would recommend it to those with a particular interest in cocoa/chocolate, or those wanting a detailed example of how the gap between rich and poor often increases through the economic forces inherent in the system we have chosen for ourselves.
Rating: 4