Chocolate and African Stability

Crooks and Liars is passing along a good article from the Modesto Bee on the definition of chocolate and how a desire by some of the commodity chocolate makers to save a couple of percentage points on ingredient costs will lead to increased consumer informational uncertainty and lower quality of the food that we call chocolate.

"The federal Food and Drug Administration is proposing to redefine the very essence of chocolate and to allow big manufacturers such as Hershey to sell a bar devoid of a key ingredient - cocoa butter. The butter's natural texture could be replaced with inferior alternatives, such as vegetable fats.....

At the moment, chocolate requires two basic ingredients - cocoa and cocoa butter. Cocoa provides much of the flavor; cocoa butter, the texture. So if, say, Hershey wanted to make a chocolate bar without cocoa butter, it can under today's rules. The product has to be labeled "chocolate flavored" (for it still has the cocoa in it) rather than "chocolate."

The major commodity chocolate makers are responding to the rather clear incentives to use subsidized crop manufactured products instead of the non-subsidized but authentic ingredients.

Michael Pollan, the author of the Omnivore's Dilemna, lays out the case in a NY Times article, that the vast majority of the food choices that we have are dramatically influenced by the perversions of the farm subsidies for five crops. Corn, wheat and soy beans are the primary sources of starch, sugar, proteins and processed fat, and since we produce so much of these commodoties at non-market prices, the glut has to be disposed of somewhere.

Besides the nutritional and health side effects of dumping those surplus and nutritionally empty calories into school lunch programs, and highly processed food that is the only food that the poor can afford to buy on a routine basis, there are several significant other strategic secondary effects of our farm policy.

Most of the world's cocoa production comes from West Africa which is not the most stable or economically prosperous area. The cocoa areas on the whole are not the oil production areas, so the rent seeking and rent protecting behavior that is a source of a lot of the insurgencies further north are not as prevalent. Cocoa production is fairly manpower intensive but it produces hard currency which means it provides some degree of stability and plenty of jobs.

If in this case cocoa butter demand is dramatically reduced as the majority of the US commodity chocolate makers switch over to vegetable oil blends, another brick is thrown through the windows of stability and stake holding in an already unstable part of the world.