Industry executives are now working on a new business model to save chocolate as a mass consumer item. Problem is, it still requires the use of niggers to grow over half of the crops.

Savour that chocolate while you can still afford it

In the not-too-distant future, chocolate will become a rarefied luxury, as expensive as caviar.

John Mason, a Canadian expert on cocoa, first made this prophesy six years ago from his base in West Africa, the epicentre of production. He was confident enough to repeat it, over and over, to the directors of the biggest chocolate companies in the world.

Alone, Ivory Coast produces more than a third of the world’s cocoa beans; there is some Ivoirien cocoa content in nearly every mass-produced chocolate bar on store shelves. But Alassane Ouattara, the presidential claimant in the country’s disputed November election, is using the crop as a political cudgel. His opponent, incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, has the loyalty of the army; cocoa revenues pay his soldiers. Recently, Mr. Ouattara imposed a ban on all cocoa exports, hoping it will force Mr. Gbagbo to leave office, a move which the U.S. and the E.U. support. So far, Mr. Gbagbo has refused. Fears are mounting that Ivory Coast will erupt in civil war.

The uncertainty has set off panic among global chocolate powerbrokers. Their worry is less about this year’s harvest, 70 per cent of which has already been extracted (the season runs from October to February); the concern is over next year’s crop – and the years that follow. Regardless of how much they can pay for increasingly expensive cocoa – futures hit a 30-year price high last month – there will simply not be enough produced.

Both Ivory Coast and neighbouring Ghana, the world’s second-largest cocoa producer, are on course for an ecological implosion. Their tree stocks are aging and sick; soils are depleted, temperatures are rising and rainfall is erratic. Young farmers are disinterested in growing cocoa, which is associated with poverty, and they are leaving for low-paying but more predictable jobs in the city. Those who stay in rural farm areas are struggling to keep up with demand and have little to invest in farm rehabilitation.

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