The countdown has started for chocolate lovers. Clocks are synchronised for the year 2020, when a possible lack of cocoa could embitter the palates of many, due to a combination of an increase in demand and a decrease in supply. The news broke at the end of 2014, when the results of a market trend analysis were released by the multinational company Barry Callebaut and picked up by several newspapers.
But is the future of cocoa really so dark? According to Pamela Thornton, who analyses the cocoa market, “2020 has been a media fabrication; it is not taken seriously by people within the cocoa research community”. But she does admit to having some concerns about chocolate’s future. “The climatic phenomenon El Nino will take place in Ecuador and Indonesia and we have noticed dryer than normal weather in West Africa. 2015 will see a shortage of cocoa and it will be quite substantial, probably of 250,000 tonnes, the biggest in several years. In the meantime the demand is growing 2-2.5 percent every year.”
In Brazil’s southern Bahia region, large estate owners grew wealthy off the fruit and the labour of those who worked their land. And Brazil was the second-largest exporter of cocoa until an act of bioterrorism destroyed the crop. The Amazonian fungus known as Vassoura de Bruxa, or the witches-broom disease, was introduced to the region in the late 1980s, although it is still unclear by whom.
What is clear, however, is that it had huge social, economic and environmental consequences. Ninety percent of the plantations were lost. More than 250,000 rural workers became unemployed and moved to the cities, where they then built favelas. “Some former cocoa farmers’ children now sell crack in the favelas,” says Daniel Piotto, a professor at Federal do Sul da Bahia University.
The future of the fruit is a puzzle of many parts, including the consequences of climate change and El Nino’s arrival in Ecuador, increased consumption in populous parts of Asia, such as India, and the transition towards new models of production, as is already happening in Brazil.