Bitter Chocolate (42 page)

But the volatile world of African politics soon caught up with the makers of eco-chocolate. Fraudulent elections in 1993 led to violence in and around Togo's capital city, Lomé. France froze its aid to the country as opposition leaders mobilized a national strike that crippled commerce and shut down Togo's exports. On a West African scale, it was a minor dust-up, but it seriously affected Green & Black's operation. The company had contracts with clients who didn't accept revolution as an excuse for delayed shipments. “We had to fly a container of cocoa beans out to our co-packer in France and then fly the freshly made chocolate to Gatwick Airport, where a van was waiting to rush it to make our two-thirty delivery slot at Sainsbury's [one of the major grocery chains in the U.K.],” recalls Sams.

Green & Black's began to ease out of its contract with the Togolese while looking around for a more peaceful cocoa country, where the natives might be less restless. Sams remembered his encounter with the Maya in the 1980s, Could the Maya grow enough organic chocolate for Sams' U.K. market?

Sams and Fairley learned that the farmers of Toledo had taken on a contract to grow commercial cocoa for Hershey, but the deal had gone bust at just about the same time as the Togolese were fighting in the streets. So things were wide open in the Belizean cocoa industry. There was only one problem.
The Mayan farmers had accepted Hershey's advice and planted the chemically sodden hybrid trees. To grow organic Criollo beans for Green & Black's, they would have to change their ways—in fact, return to the practices of their ancestors but on a commercial scale. Craig Sams rang up Justino Peck, president of the TCGA, to ask if this was feasible.

Peck gave Sams a sense of just how bad things had become since Hummingbird Hershey pulled out. “This was a disaster. People were abandoning their plantations, and the jungle was taking over.” Sams says. So he offered the TCGA a deal. Green & Black's would make the Toledo farmers a principal supplier with a rolling five-year contract for organically grown cocoa, and they would get $1.75 a pound (a little more than the amount Hershey initially offered and a long way from the disastrous $0.55 it was willing to pay at the end). Green & Black's would get organic certification for the TCGA so that even if the U.K. firm pulled out they could still take advantage of Europe's premium cocoa market, and Sams would give the association $20,000 in start-up cash. The TCGA was understandably skeptical, and at first its members resisted. But Toledo was not a place with a lot of options, especially for the Maya, and many of the farmers eventually agreed to the deal.

Green & Black's decided to go one step further and produce a brand-name chocolate bar called Maya Gold. Of course, the Maya would not make the chocolate or even grind the beans—those high-paying jobs would go to manufacturers in Europe. But Sams and Fairley declared that the new Maya Gold label would have another exclusive property: It would not be just a certified organic chocolate bar, it would also be declared a “fair trade” product.

The nascent fair trade initiative was the most recent development in the growing consumer consciousness movement of Europe and North America. Backed by Oxfam, Christian Aid and the Women's Institute in the United Kingdom, it provides a
stamp of approval—a fair trade logo—for goods that are bought from manufacturers in the developing world for what is considered (by the fair trade foundation) to be a fair price. For a product to be certified as “fair” requires an even more rigorous screening process than the organic certification. It must be made with no abusive labour practices, in particular no child or slave labour. Chemicals can be used in the growing or manufacturing of a product so long as workers are provided with adequate protective clothing and air quality (though chemicals are disallowed by the organic certifiers). An additional fair trade premium is paid to the cooperative or company, which is supposed to be used communally, to build clean water systems or provide schooling for the children of workers. But the most important aspect of the fair trade system is that it gives people in the developing world some advantage in the amoral jungle of supply and demand where the profit motive reigns supreme.

Maya Gold was launched in March 1994. In addition to being organic, it was the first product to be stamped by the Fairtrade Foundation's logo in the U.K. Food reviewers declared that the bar had an exceptional flavour, a wisp of orange and spice accents in a complex dark chocolate.

High quality is a small part of the battle for the fickle consumer in the ruthless world of product placement. The fair trade label was far more important in many respects than the superior taste of the chocolate. Green & Black's held a press conference to announce its major development in ethical luxury, while the BBC sent a news crew to Belize to produce a documentary on the Mayan farmers who were producing the beans. Among the plethora of choices available to the U.K. consumer, there was now a chocolate they could eat with the satisfying confidence that it was, in the judgment of Oxfam, principled. The name Maya Gold had cachet, evoking images of a mysterious tribe that once governed with an advanced culture and sensibility in the lush tropics of the New World. The fact that the British Empire had reduced
the natives of Belize to bare-knuckled subsistence after several centuries of looting, killing and subjugation was more information than anyone would care to read on a cleverly branded product.

The Belizean farmers receive roughly six pence for every bar sold at £1.60 in retail stores in the United Kingdom. It's not much, though it is several times what non–fair trade cocoa pays. The farmers' income is not the real reason for fair trade's success and Craig Sams is among the first to admit that the popularity of ethical purchasing is more about the consumer than the producer: “Consumers don't want to be part of a problem. They want manufacturers to help them be part of the solution to these problems and to relieve their feelings of despair, pessimism and helplessness over the disappearance of rainforests and indigenous cultures and global warming.”

Even if the whole operation was geared more to assuaging First-World guilt than benefiting developing-world farmers, Sams did not let the farmers down. He bought every one of their beans over the coming years and paid his set price no matter what happened to cocoa beans on the open market, plus the fair trade premium of ten per cent. The British Department for International Development intially warned the Toledo farmers not to get involved in yet another (probably) ill-fated cocoa growing project, but with a few years of success, the DFIF heartily approved of it, giving the Toledo venture a grant of nearly US$500,000. The farmers of TCGA slowly returned to traditional farming, nurturing their old tree stock back into existence and growing Criollo varieties without chemicals.

Other international agencies such as the UN had also initially tried to discourage the Maya from going along with the Green & Black's venture, dismissing the project as doomed. The market for premium beans was too small, they argued. If the farmers wanted to grow cocoa, they should return to the high-volume mass market; it was hoped that the price would increase in a few years. But by 2001, naysayers were hard to find. The World Bank
produced a report about cocoa-growing in Central America, a document that was never released, admitting that Craig Sams had done wonders for the Toledo area. The farmers were producing the highest-quality cocoa in the region, mostly because the guaranteed price allowed them to develop proper fermenting and drying techniques. Elsewhere in Central America, said the report, farmers didn't bother with quality since it made no difference to the price. The Maya of Belize now had an edge on the whole region.

With their added income, most of the Toledo farmers began sending their children to school again in such numbers that Punta Gorda had to provide a regular bus service. High school enrolment has increased from ten per cent of the community's children to seventy per cent today. But no matter how much life improves, the Maya will never do more than grow the beans that others make into chocolate. Tariff barriers in Europe prohibit finished food products from entering the country: Only raw materials are imported, ensuring that consumers get the products they want and European workers get the manufacturing jobs they need. Until that changes and the Maya can export more than just their beans, they will never be wealthy enough to buy the expensive chocolate bar that bears their name.

Green & Blacks was a runaway success by the early 2000s, but Craig Sams knew he needed capital if the company was to keep expanding. “I had pretty well gone as far as I could with our limited financial resources, and we needed to become increasingly professional,” says Sams. The counterculture maverick of the food industry now needed establishment types to keep his products in the market. Enter William Kendall.

Kendall was not part of the mod scene in London during the 1960s as Sams had been, but instead part of a savvy new generation
who have become major players in the organic food industry in the United Kingdom. Kendall is a London-based businessman who entered the highly competitive prefabricated organic soup market when he took over management of a product called New Covent Garden Soup. He was only in his late twenties when he transformed the loss-making enterprise into a corporation with an annual turnover of US$20 million. Kendall and his partner made a hefty profit when they sold the soup firm in
1997,
allowing them to purchase one of the fastest-growing organic lines in the U.K., a chocolate company called Green & Black's.

By then, Green & Black's was doing well in the U.S. market. It was even providing stiff competition to America's bestselling organic chocolate bar, Newman's Own, a product line founded by the legendary Hollywood actor Paul Newman and managed by his daughter. Newman's Own, like other products he has launched, has additional moral clout because Newman gives all of his profits to charity. Another major American competitor, Endangered Species Chocolate, funds wildlife protection. In this tough struggle for guilt-based consumer loyalty, Green & Black's Maya Gold, branded as both organic and fair trade, increased its market penetration in the United States thanks to the flint-eyed business acumen of the new majority shareholder.

Kendall is in all respects the new face of the organic world, swapping Birkenstocks for brogues and counterculture hangouts for corporate boardrooms. He owns a three-hundred-acre organic farm in Suffolk but declares that he is a businessman—a venture capitalist—who just happens to be interested in organic and fair trade products. He doesn't see any contradiction between the values of the antiglobalization movement and the ethos of the corporate world. Business is always a tricky balance between morality and acquisition—some would say an impossible one—and many have faltered in the past. Surely the Cadbury family believed themselves to be ethical traders looking to offer people improved working conditions in Bournville while providing a
cup of hot cocoa as an alternative to gin? Yet the Cadburys were ultimately roasted on the same spit as all the other slave traders of the British Empire.

In 2002, William Kendall wanted more capital to run Green & Black's, so he made a deal with a new shareholder. Cadbury Schweppes bought five per cent of the company in its bid to move into the lucrative market of the conscientious consumer. The idealists who invented organics and fair trade accused Kendall of selling out, but he argues it was just good business. Craig Sams defended the deal as well: “We are learning a lot from them about the cacao market … and they are learning a lot from us about organics, fair trade and corporate responsibility. I suppose, indeed I hope, it's inevitable that their involvement will deepen and lead to control, but in that process we will have engineered a sort of reverse takeover, on a cultural level, of the world's largest confection company.”

It was part of a trend. The consumer wouldn't know by looking at the labels that some of the most popular brands of organics in the alternative food stores are now owned by transnationals. Mars, Inc. has acquired Seeds of Change, which first came on the U.S. market in the late 1980s with the stated objective “to restore biodiversity and revolutionize the way we think about food.” Seeds of Change owners said much the same thing as Craig Sams when they were questioned about “selling out”: They needed the cash. The alternative press buzzed with talk of the merger—a company that built its reputation on the importance of providing proper nutrition to American families is now the property of a junk food purveyor.

But Seeds of Change is hardly alone. Heinz Corporation owns a long list of organic products with names that evoke the “small is beautiful” mantra of the movement: Imagine Rice Dream, Health Valley, Walnut Acres, ShariAnn's and Mountain Sun—all companies bought in a sweep when Heinz acquired Arrowhead Mills. Unilever owns the counterculture ice cream line
Ben & Jerry's; Coca-Cola owns the fruit juice and granola bar company Odwalla; Tyson Foods, the controversial U.S. meatpacking enterprise with a reputation for having the worst working conditions in the slaughterhouse business, owns Nature's Farm Organic, the marketers of chickens that apparently enjoyed life before they became dinner.