In the programme Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon investigated the use of child slave labour in cocoa farming while raising some questions about Fair Trade.

Thankfully, Panorama has not succumbed too much to the modern TV disease of ‘reality’, so the programme was both quite watchable and informative. (Other bastions of BBC documentary strands, such as my once beloved ‘Horizon‘ have become totally dumbed down and unviewable.)

If you’ve read ‘Bitter Chocolate‘ by Carol Off, the state of cacao farming in Ivory Coast and the forced ‘migration’ of children from Burkina Faso to be used as unpaid labour will not come as a surprise. (You can listen to an interview with Carol Off about her book here.)

Panorama covered a lot of the same ground, but did include a lighter touch with it’s ‘made with child labour label’ logo chocolate bar.

The right target?

Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) is pretty much run by the big cocoa processors – ADM, Cargill, Callebaut, etc. The nature of commodity crops tends to make them corruptible, so it’s no surprise that the country that provides 50% of the world’s cocoa might have some issues.

Ghana has a much better track record. It’s more stable politically, has a good reputation for the treatment of it’s cocoa (if not the genetics) and in Kuapa Kokoo one of the most famous and reputable Fair Trade cooperatives.

While I’m sure that no cooperative will be perfect, Kuapa Kokoo was a bit too much of an easy target – because of its visibility. Apart from the admitted problems and suspension of some farmers, the cooperative came out fairly well. This didn’t exactly feel like the sharpest of journalism. Even when more ex-child labourers were found, this was a result of Kuapa Kokoo’s own investigations.

The Ivory Coast Fair Trade schemes were another matter, and I would have like to have seen the programme spend a lot more time here, especially given the complete and apparently uncooperative denial of any problems from the likes of Nestlé. Investigative journalism is not so easy in Ivory Coast though, as the disappearance of French-Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer illustrates.

Apart from Kuapa Kokoo, Fair Trade cocoa is fairly new to Africa. Most of the cacao used in the Fair Trade bars that have sprung up over the last ten years has come not from Africa, but from the South America and Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic.

In the fine chocolate and cacao worlds there are many stories and rumours about wheeling and dealing, bad deals and corruption in Fair Trade, or whether the scheme is appropriate for the premium end of the cocoa market. Some time spent checking out the voracity of these rumours in Latin America would have been really useful.

The cocoa trader

We heard from a cocoa commodity market trader. This was very telling. The trader was quite happy to admit that he had no interest in quality of the cocoa or how it was harvested. Well, that explains why most chocolate doesn’t taste very good then.

More shocking was the blunt admission that although he cared ‘personally’ whether child labour was involved in the production of the cocoa he was trading, he told us it ‘doesn’t matter’ from a business point of view. We’d have to ask – if the trader really did care personally – whether he was in the wrong job.

The problems with the cocoa commodity market were pretty much summed up here – banks of monitors with disconnected figures while a trader makes gambles that bring his company profit, condemning cocoa farmers to lives of poverty. Ok, it’s not all his personal fault, but this is symptomatic of how the cocoa trade functions.

It was good to see the Harkin-Engel protocol covered (a failed Washington initiative to label candy bars ‘child slave labor free’), though this will be old news to readers of Steve Chung’s ‘Hot Chocolate’ column from our old Chocolate Connoisseurs Club newsletter.

Making chocolate

The programme did rather commit a disservice to actual, bean-to-bar chocolate makers by misrepresenting the chocolate making process.

It was great to see Marc Demarquette get some airtime in the programme. All due respect to Marc though, he is NOT one of the UK’s most respected ‘chocolate makers’ as we were told in the introduction. (Nor is he pretending to be ). He is in fact one of the UK’s most respected chocolatiers (an artisan who buys high end chocolate and makes fresh bonbons and ganaches.)

Chocolate making, while simple in principle, is a complex and marginally economically viable process – especially at the fine end of the spectrum. I guess I say this at almost every turn, but there are currently only three companies that I know of making chocolate directly from the bean in the UK. They are: Cadbury Kraft, Willie Harcourt-Cooze’s Delectable and Duffy Sheardown’s Red Star Chocolate.

In fact it was Duffy who roasted (and I assume winnowed and nibbed) the cocoa used by the programme. Marc told me that he further cleaned the beans, then created a fine powder that was ground into a liquor. This was then mixed with cocoa butter, sugar, dried milk power and conched in a small granite conch for 51 hours. Marc describes this as “a very rough process which had achieved a respectable result”.

The recipe mimicked mass-market confectionery chocolate, but didn’t use any vegetable fat. As Paul Kenyon told us ‘this is chocolate as we know chocolate to be’. Well, if you mean the newsagent kind.

I know it wasn’t the point of the programme, but we didn’t really see how chocolate was made, especially the very important aspects of bean handling and treatment and most crucial of all, roasting.

The whole ‘made with child labour label’ gag was pretty good though – the chocolate Marc made was moulded and wrapped up in bars with a ‘made with child labour’ logo proudly displayed on the front. Members of the public were interviewed on the street as to whether they’d buy these bars or not. Of course the answer is ‘no’, which just shows how people might react if they were more aware of problems in the cacao production chain. (Or am I being optimistic here?)

Factual errors

Where cacao grows

A basic error came in the first few minutes of the show – we’re told that cacao grows in conditions ‘found only in a narrow belt of jungle just ten degrees either side of the equator’. I’ve never seen that figure quoted anywhere in any chocolate reference – the tropical 20 degrees being more common.

Ten degrees of latitude either side of the equator excludes both Madagascar – an African country famous for it’s quality cacao, and the regions where the Aztecs and Maya grew their cacao. Thus contradicting the statement made a few scenes earlier, when we were told that cacao originated in Central America. (It didn’t – recent genetic research confirmed the Upper Amazon region as the origin. Chocolate, however, is a Central American invention.)

The ‘chocolate earth’ graphic running under this part of the programme was a little more accurate, but still managed to miss out the Dominican Republic.

Next we’re told that ‘cocoa pods ripen quickly in the heat of the sun’. It takes a cacao pod about 5-6 months to mature. Is that ‘quickly’?

The first Fair Trade chocolate bar

Another error later on – we’re told that only 1 in 10 chocolate bars in the UK carry the Fair Trade logo and that ‘the first to do so was Divine chocolate, back in the later 90s’. The UK Fair Trade website begs to differ. Green & Black’s Maya Gold was the first ever certified Fair Trade product in 1994.

Maya Gold is a product still very popular today with a loyal following. (Though not without it’s own issues, and is dumbed down from it’s original 70% to the current 55%. If G&B’s PR department happen to be reading this, please check with your founder, Craig Sams before contacting me to tell me otherwise!)

Some of that loyal following might be Panorama viewers. Some of them might even remember buying Maya Gold before the name ‘Divine’ had ever been heard of in the chocolate world. Just how hard is it to research this stuff?

All this might seem like nitpicking. The worry is though that if some of these basics are wrong, just how far can we trust the research for the rest of the programme?

Transparency

The final point of the programme is about transparency and tracibility, and here I’m in absolute agreement that this is the way forward for ‘ethically sound’ cacao and chocolate. Fair Trade might be part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer.

The only way we can truly trust our food is to understand where it came from and how it was produced. For foods made from commodities grown in other continents, this is particularly pertinent.

Luckily, there is a virtuous circle that exists in the production of the highest quality chocolate. You can only make really good chocolate if the source cacao is of the right kind and well cared for. That only happens when farmers are paid a decent amount for their cacao, and it also only happens when the sources are known and very specific.

This of course makes chocolate more expensive (about three times as much is my guess). The good news though is that we don’t need to eat as much if chocolate tasted better (less than a third?), and we don’t get addicted to a sugar rush. So we get better flavour, more pleasure and all the health benefits without the downsides and farmers get a higher price for their cacao.

Doesn’t that sound like fairer trade?

The post BBC Panorama: Chocolate – The Bitter Truth appeared first on Seventy%.

As well as chocolate, Duffy and I share another interest – Formula 1. Though when I say ‘share an interest’, I mean in my case watching F1 on the telly from the sofa, and in Duffy’s case, spending most of his career working in the motor racing industry.

Given that rather unfair advantage for Duffy, it probably wasn’t the best idea of mine to take up Duffy’s F1 choc bar challenge.

From an email from Duffy:

“I have been reading all the so-called motor-racing experts trying to predict the season and realised that they have absolutely no idea what will happen. The best they can come up with is that Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull and possibly Mercedes will be near the top and that Virgin, Lotus and HRT won’t.

So I figured we might enjoy a little bet. On a race-by-race basis we each pick a driver and if my pick beats your pick you owe me a bar of chocolate. Yours beats mine and I owe you a bar. We can settle up at season end. We alternate first picks so you can go first…

You have until Sunday morning to accept this challenge but be warned – with the regulation changes good qualifying pace is unlikely to completely translate to good race pace…”

So, I’ve foolishly agreed to the bet, and am now stocking up 19 chocolate bars to hand over at the end of the season, but hoping I might get lucky and end up with a few Red Star Chocolate bars as well.

We’ll be recording our picks in comments to this post, and you’re all welcome to join in, though I’m not taking on any more chocolate bar bets though – not sure I can afford to take on any more losses.

(* indicates who chose first)

Results so far

Bahrain, 14 March 2010:
Race winner: Fernando Alonso
Duffy’s call: Alonso
Martin’s call: Vettel *
Result: Reliability issues hamper Vettel and Alonso wins it.
Score: 1-0 to Duffy

Australia, 28 March 2010:
Race winner: Jenson Button
Duffy’s call: Vettel *
Martin’s call: Mark Webber
Result: Vettel slides off and is beaten by Webber’s disappointing 9th.
Score: 1-1

Malaysia, 4 April 2010:
Race winner: Sebastian Vettel
Duffy’s call: Nico Rosberg
Martin’s call: Vettel (after a stewards enquiry!) *
Result: Vettel finally gets a win, in ultra-cool style.
Score: 2-1 to Martin

China, 18 April 2010:
Race winner: Jenson Button
Duffy’s call: Fernando Alonso *
Martin’s call: Lewis Hamilton
Result: Alonso’s jump start and Lewis’s skill through the pack give it to Hamilton
Score: 3-1 to Martin

Spain, 9 May 2010:
Race winner: Mark Webber
Duffy’s call: Mark Webber
Martin’s call: Vettel *
Result:  Webber untouchable after Vettel fails to overtake at the start.
Score: 3-2 to Martin

Monaco, 16 May 2010:
Race winner: Mark Webber
Duffy’s call: Robert Kubica *
Martin’s call: Mark Webber
Result:  Webber does it again.
Score: 4-2 to Martin

Turkey, 30 May 2010:
Race winner: Lewis Hamilton
Duffy’s call: Sebastian Vettel
Martin’s call: Lewis Hamilton *
Result:  Hamilton’s first win of the season.
Score: 5-2 to Martin

Canada, 13 June 2010:
Race winner: Lewis Hamilton
Duffy’s call: Lewis Hamilton *
Martin’s call: Jenson Button
Result:  Two in a row for Hamilton and Duffy’s catching up.
Score: 5-3 to Martin

European (Valencia), 27 June 2010:
Race winner: Sebastian Vettel
Duffy’s call: Sebastian Vettel
Martin’s call: Fernando Alonso *
Result:  Vettel comes in strong and it’s almost neck and neck here.
Score: 5-4 to Martin

Silverstone, UK, 11 July 2010:
Race winner: Mark Webber
Duffy’s call: Sebastian Vettel *
Martin’s call: Lewis Hamilton
Result:  Big win for Webber, neither of us made the right call. Hamilton came in a good second though and Vettel way behind, so a win for Martin
Score: 6-4 to Martin

Germany, 25 July 2010:
Race winner: Fernando Alonso
Duffy’s call: Sebastian Vettel
Martin’s call: Fernando Alonso *
Result:  Rare success for Alonso, Martin gets lucky again.
Score: 7-4 to Martin

Hungary, 1 August 2010:
Race winner: Mark Webber
Duffy’s call: Sebastian Vettel *
Martin’s call: Mark Webber
Result:  Webber yet again in a thrilling race and Vettel third. Amateurs are trouncing professionals in the choc bar challenge
Score: 8-4 to Martin

The post Announcement: F1 choc bar challenge appeared first on Seventy%.

The new design is just the beginning. We still need to port the forum to the new format and a new software platform. Not only will this bring the old forum up to date, it will also let all our users loose on the rest of the site, and we look forward to blog contributions and comments from you soon. There’s a techy challenge involved though, so we’ll probably need to get Chocolate Week out of the way first. Please not that while the old forum sits and waits for its upgrade, we’re not accepting new registrations at the moment – we were just getting an uncontrollable amount of spam that the old ‘Snitz’ software just couldn’t handle.

Another big upgrade is bringing the review section – the old ‘Chocopaedia’ – into the new WordPress platform. This is not such a big job, but it’s still going to take some programming effort and data transfer. This is also going to take a little while, but we hope soon to a nice shiney new review section, along with new reviews and new reviewers, and we’ll be recruiting new volunteers in the near future as well.

Please let us know any comments or thoughts about the site, and look out for more changes and improvements hopefully appearing fast and furiously!

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