Bitter Chocolate (38 page)

Lamphere sent the bills to Lion Capital Management, who sent them to Agbre, who paid them out of his company's account (if they were paid at all). Lamphere has no idea how much money rolled through the operation in this fashion; he heard that the Ivorian media had reported tens of millions of dollars had been doled out to the Fulton plant. If that was the case, Lamphere says, he never saw any of it. “It was just rotten,” says Lamphere. “Something stunk.”

What was even more peculiar for Lamphere was how the company purchased the beans. Contrary to the claim that they would get cocoa directly from the Ivorian farm gate, NY3C was obliged to buy its beans from U.S. brokers at a premium prices. And the man who was doing the buying was none other than Yalle Agbre. Lamphere wasn't sure the company could really make a go of it without cheaper beans but what was even more vexing was that the beans were of such poor quality. Lamphere couldn't figure it out. Even though his technicians inspected the lots of beans they were buying and tested them, the product that
would eventually arrive at the factory was inferior to what they thought they had purchased. Lamphere had contracts to sell cocoa butter to companies such as Hershey, but he was often stuck with bad beans. Who was making money from all of this? Lamphere often asked himself.

Lamphere had managed to hire as many as seventy people and he was actually producing bulk chocolate powder and butter. His profits were just enough to pay the staff. But in March 2006, the employees found their cheques were bouncing. Soon after, the city shut off the factory's water. The company's unpaid tax bills amounted to US$450,000. By the spring of 2006, NY3C was seven million dollars in arrears. A high-level delegation of Ivorians arrived for a tour of the plant at the end of March, and then retreated to Côte d'Ivoire, promising to review the situation. Embarrassed politicians, who had taken part in ribbon-cutting ceremonies and had helped to finance loans and grants to the African company, urged the Ivorians to get their collective act together and at least reimburse the employees for their wages.

Another European Union audit report on the Ivorian
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was released in the spring of 2006. It paints a damning picture of the FRC and its cavalier attitude towards even the notion of accountability. The European auditors got hold of Côte d'Ivoire government records revealing that the FRC directors voted to purchase the old Nestlé plant for nine billion West African francs (about US$10 million) without even investigating the plant's viability. The FRC controllers along with their friends in the banks, Bouhoun Bouabré and Victor Nembellisini, went ahead anyway and bought the Fulton plant, investing as much as US$26 million in the doomed chocolate company over the next year (though the Ivorian press claims several times that amount flowed to the chocolate company).

For Kieffer's Network, the purpose of the plant was obvious. The American company, with its veneer of legitimacy, provided
a way to transfer money to other concerns, including financing “the war effort.” The chocolate makers of Fulton, New York were just hapless pawns.

Now hanging around his home in Fulton, Jerry Lamphere is looking for a new job, or hoping that some serious investors will come to put the plant back on its feet, something he's is convinced is possible. But he shakes his head and wonders about the encounter with the FRC. “I don't know what went on behind the scenes or what they did with the money,” says Lamphere. “I don't think the plant was ever supposed to come on line, personally. I think we did things in spite of them and got it operational.… I guess they got the wrong people involved in their project. Because all of the staff was just simply dedicated to making chocolate.”

One day in Abidjan, Ange Aboa takes me to see the boss of one of the most successful, and legitimate, cocoa cooperatives in the country. The man will not let me use his name or refer to anything that might identify him. We'll call him Mr. X.

Mr. X meets us in his garden, a walled and fortified compound that is protected by his security specialists. Even here, in his own yard, he whispers as we talk and he glances over his shoulder from time to time. The fear is palpable. Mr. X was a farmer before he became a successful businessman; he has little education, and despite his fashionable suit he comes across as a bit of a country bumpkin. But he is also one of the most knowledgeable, and reputably honest, people in the business. I ask him to explain how the
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really works. Where does the money go? His jaw drops and he emits a little sound, like a squeal. “You want me to tell you how these guys run cocoa? Where is Guy-André Kieffer right now?” he asks wide-eyed, his whispered voice barely audible. “Where is Jean Hélène? [the reporter from Radio France who
was shot]. That's what they do to people who ask questions. Can you imagine what they do to those who answer them?”

Ange is able to persuade Mr. X that we are on the level, and the cocoa manager finally agrees to describe the
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as he sees it. He explains the evolution of the cocoa hierarchy through the ancient clan system of Côte d'Ivoire. The former president, Houphouët-Boigny, he says, put control of cocoa into the hands of farmers he knew and trusted. These farmers cultivated the land and developed their cocoa expertise while working in the countryside. Other clans, principally the Cru people, functioned as bureaucrats, while still others became experts in commerce. All of this worked, and for many decades there was a system of checks and balances; opportunities for corruption were limited by a widely dispersed control system. It was the genius of Le Vieux, but he is gone and times have changed. “Now the Cru have all the power,” says Mr. X. “They invent phony co-ops, they have all the connections to the minister of finance, but they produce nothing. We [the producers] are afraid. We have no power. But we grow all the cocoa.”

Money appropriated from the producers in levies is supposed to help them by providing infrastructure and soft loans. But once that money disappears into the network of fictitious agencies, they lose track of it. They no longer have access to subsidies or loans, as they did in the old days. There is no money for basic maintenance of their resource, not even for chemicals and new trees.

“Why don't the farmers refuse to pay the fees?” I ask.

“They try to do that. But they have no choice.”

“What would happen to you if you reported all of this?”

“They would kill me,” he says. The words are hardly audible. Sweat beads on his forehead.

It's hard to understand the extent to which the state machinery has been undermined by opportunists. A French NGO worker who has lived in Côte d'Ivoire for many years but who
also wants to remain anonymous confirms the bitter, frightened analysis of Mr. X. The NGO worker has been all through the country, taking care of migrant workers and trying to shield them from the excesses of the Gbagbo regime. “Think Mafia,” he says, simply. “Think Sicily.”

Going from one office tower to the next in Abidjan and in the cocoa district, setting up appointments for interviews with secretaries and exchanging official business cards, you get the impression that you are moving within conventionally legitimate state machinery. But outward appearances are misleading. “These are Bushmen who have taken over the levers of power and authority,” my NGO friend explains, betraying some of his French chauvinism. He says their veneer of credibility, with all of their rhetoric and official trappings, is false. A foreign businessman who has been in the country for just as long says much the same thing: “There is corruption all over this continent, but here it goes beyond even what is normal in Africa. This is criminal.”

GAK became convinced that Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa business had been systematically criminalized. Other foreign observers have been reluctant to embrace his grim analysis. The World Bank and the IMF have suspended funding to Côte d'Ivoire in the past, but as long as the Gbagbo regime keeps up to date on its obligations to international lenders—and allows the cocoa companies to export their precious goods—these bodies seem intent on ignoring evidence of government corruption. Diplomats say privately that there is another reason for international tolerance of obvious corruption in Côte d'Ivoire: As bad as the situation seems to be, it is at least politically stable. Overt criticism might alter that, and West Africa can ill afford another Liberia or Sierra Leone.

And there is another factor. Côte d'Ivoire, according to diplomatic sources, is easy to control from the outside. “It never really stopped being a colony,” says one diplomat who studied France's
influence in the country. “No matter what Ivorians tell you, they are still in the thrall of Paris.”

The European Union has tried to penetrate the murky activities in the cocoa
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. The EU began to closely audit the comings and goings of cocoa money in 2002. Kieffer got hold of many of their preliminary reports and circulated the documents widely, while he worked for CCC and after. In those reports, the EU auditors are increasingly frustrated with the lack of transparency and their inability to get access to significant—public—documents. Managers of the
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tell the auditors the internal workings of the cocoa trade are none of their business. The cocoa trade is private enterprise, they say. The language of the audits gets more critical in each edition and finally condemns the Ivorian system in the strongest terms the EU can muster, stopping just short of calling the
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criminal.

The EU reports reveal a shell game in which the money passes through a maze of agencies and gradually disappears and regards the FRC, the group that subsidizes the Fulton chocolate factory, as the worst of the lot, since it has control of the treasury. The money that is supposed to support a base price for the farmers is diverted first of all for war funds and then to the president's office. The auditors describe a tragic cycle: crushing taxes and fees and arbitrary pricing force farmers to sell their beans illegally in other countries; the government of Côte d'Ivoire recovers the money it is losing in this manner by increasing fees and taxes and by raiding reserve funds that are supposed to improve the lives of farmers and stabilize the prices they get for their product. Farmers increasingly seek their own solutions to escape the exploitation. The resource withers and eventually will die.

The greed of those who are within the circle of political power and influence seems inexhaustible. According to the preliminary investigation by the EU, billions of West African francs are loaned to the president and the defence ministry, loans that are
organized by Côte d'Ivoire's finance department and facilitated by the National Investment Bank. Other unusual money transfers include a payment to the Washington World Group of (a public relations firm whose client list included Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein among many tyrants and despots) to lobby for the Ivorian government in the United States. The FRC would tell the auditors nothing about these endeavours, not even agreeing to explain how the agency managed to start up yet another financial institution without ever registering it. The Agricultural Finance Bank (BFA), appears to be the agency that manages the cocoa and coffee treasuries, though no one is clear on who actually owns it or where the money goes.

The EU targets the cocoa
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and the Ivorian regime, but Kieffer's reporting went to the heart of the political system. GAK was deeply concerned about the activities of the transnational corporations that had managed to get a stranglehold on the cocoa industry of West Africa. Fifteen foreign corporations control ninety per cent of all the cocoa trade in the country, and a few at the top share a virtual monopoly.

Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are supreme in both cocoa and coffee and, according to documents Kieffer distributed, they are fiercely competitive for domination in the Ivorian cocoa trade. Cargill's warehouses and cocoa-grinding facilities are prominent throughout Côte d'Ivoire, but nowhere was there a single company representative who would talk to Ange and me. We would make appointments, only to have them cancelled before we arrived. The cocoa industry as a whole is highly competitive and notoriously secretive. Few journalists gain access to its managers.

Based in the farm fields of Minneapolis, Cargill is a massive international corporation and at the same time a family concern, possibly the largest privately owned corporation in the world. Cargill's influence over the food we eat—where it comes from and how it's produced—is staggering. Brewster Kneen, a Canadian
agribusiness expert, is one of the few people to penetrate the mysterious conglomerate. In his book
Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies
, Kneen describes a company whose influence over people's lives is pervasive, but basically unknown. There is hardly a mouthful of food consumed in North America that did not pass through part of its corporate empire.