Cool video: Ivory Coast cocoa farmers taste chocolate for first time

[GoddamnyamanProf]

Video was bittersweet

Like the finest chocolate :woww:

 

[tmonster]

They should be the ones making quality chocolate and eating it, not those belgian fukks.

you should look up the history of those belgian chocolate hands

pro tip the people on the site that pic was taken from got it all wrong, shockingly :jordansideeye:



the reality it is more closely related to this

and this

let's just say King Leopold has a strange way of commemorating stuff
https://suite.io/michael-streich/5gz32nv

 

[tmonster]

they talk about the history of belgian chocolate hands briefly in this video

 

[big bun]

That was cool. My people

 

[Kritic]

That's one of the first things you notice when you go to Africa, some of the people are extremely poor but they happy as hell and stay smiling. That's not always the case but most of the time they real good at finding a way to smile through all the bullshyt, thats on Pac.

hood ppl are like that too. i'm usually always stressed the fuq out. i stopped going to the hood but when i used to i couldn't believe the conditions ppl live in but they happy and don't give a fuq about shyt.

but i've already tasted the fruit and i cannot just not give a fuq.

my lifestyle is a little too expensive even for me.

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

hood ppl are like that too. i'm usually always stressed the fuq out. i stopped going to the hood but when i used to i couldn't believe the conditions ppl live in but they happy and don't give a fuq about shyt.

but i've already tasted the fruit and i cannot just not give a fuq.

my lifestyle is a little too expensive even for me.

That's just that soul, it translates from the Diaspora to Africa. Being Black is a beautiful thing as long as you don't lose touch with it.

 

[Kritic]

those african niccas need to be educated on health and stay away from chocolate. it's understandable they lost their mind in tasting for the first time.


too many classic quotes on the vid to mentioned.

 

[Poitier]

I find this video pretty distasteful (and that's aside from the link between cacao plantations in Cote d'Ivoire and childslavery).

I work in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire, just on the border of Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. The men I employ are largely cocoa farmers, when they're not in the forest taking complex observational data on primate behavior and ecology.

Most of the people in this region are farmers with 5-10 acres in cacao or rubber production, and a much smaller subsistence plot with manioc, cassava, rice, pineapple, avocado, and oranges. Cacao is a labor-intensive crop. Once a year, the pods get harvested from the trees. They're then cut open and the cacao bean is pulled out of the membrane and left on tarps in the sun to dry (everything smells like vinegar as the beans ferment), before being bagged up in 50L sacks, and then brought to central cacao-grower organizations. If you're in a slightly more developed part of the country or part of a wealthy organization, you can get your cacao loaded onto trucks to bring them to a central location. Otherwise, we see men with these big sacks on bicycles pushing them from the village to their closest big town. Where I work, guys are generally walking 15-20 km. Once you get your cocoa beans to the organization, you're at the mercy of the buyers. They generally set a price per kilo, and sometimes will set a quota for the amount they're buying from particular regions depending on supply and demand.

Cacao is an attractive crop because demand is fairly steady, and the farms have been productive for a really long time. The problem is that you only harvest once a year, and then you have to rely on that lump sum of cash to get you through a whole year. This is particularly hard because mobile banking hasn't really penetrated the market, and what (few) banks there are in rural southwestern Cote d'Ivoire aren't really set up to cater to small-scale cash crop farmers. Some people are relying on the long-term prospects of rubber, which is currently getting better prices/kilo and can be harvested year-round - this makes it a lot easier to pay for things like school fees, uniforms, books, and supplies that need to paid for year-round. The problem is that rubber plantations take a while to come into production (5-7 years), so first of all you're cutting down your producing cacao trees, and then you're twiddling your fingers for 6 years while you're not earning any money, hoping that the price of rubber won't crash when all the new trees start producing, and that there's still a market in the future.

The region is still politically unstable, and conflicts over land rights are a major part of that. A lot of the men I work with either fled themselves, or sent their families, to refugee camps in Liberia during the recent crisis. During that time, people from northern Cote d'Ivoire moved south and took residence in these abandoned farms - so even now, two years after La Crise officially ended, people still in refugee camps in Liberia are sneaking across the border and killing people they suspect took over their land. In addition, the effects of climate change are making the rains less predictable. The rainy season normally goes August-October (more or less); we didn't get rain in 2013 until almost the end of November, which had serious consequences both for people's cash crops and people's subsistence crops. Food prices are rising, commodity prices are falling, and the situation is looking grim. The forested buffer zone around the national park I work in has now been entirely converted to fallow fields, cacao, coffee, and rubber plantations.

And, the men I work with know what chocolate is. When they can afford to buy it, their kids eat a knock-off version of nutella called Chocomax (it is pretty gross). These are smart, sophisticated adult men (and women, though fewer women own their own land... they mostly just do a lot of the labor on their husbands' and fathers' farms). Even if they didn't know what chocolate was, they're plugged into their local economies, they have a sense of larger global economic forces, and they know what's going on (we listen to BBC world service: francais every night in the forest on Ferdinand's satellite radio. They'd ask me cutting and incisive questions about stupid American politics, like who the hell is that Sarah Palin person anyway?).

But look, this is the way an extractive (exploitative) cash-crop economy works. It's not cute or endearing that these men who are working incredibly hard have never, or rarely, had the opportunity to sample the end-product of their labor. It's not touching that you have to go to the big city to find chocolate, and that only a little of it is locally produced (Milka is very popular in Abidjan; Ivorian brands less so), It wouldn't be touching if you showed a cell-phone to a coltan miner in DRC and said "Look at this amazing machine your backbreaking labor in dangerous conditions enabled!" or a diamond miner in Sierra Leone with your sparkly pretty engagement ring and said, totally amazed, "But why don't you have one?" Consumers in the developed world should be smarter than that. The producers in the developing world - the folks enabling our lifestyles - certainly are.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:22 AM on July 30 [351 favorites]

http://www.metafilter.com/141455/This-is-why-white-people-are-so-healthy#5661910

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

So many complainers; not enough doers.

If you're so concerned about white exploitation, take advantage of your own resources as an American and do something to help. Go create a fukking chocolate factory that harvests and produces the final product in Africa, then export it to America.

Put people to work and pay them a fair wage in Africa. Put black people in America to work by handling marketing, sales and distribution.

Jesus Christ I'm so tired of the crying.

Anybody want to do something about it? I'll put up the first $5,000.

Could get some serious funds through kickstarter too

Similarly, Im disappointed with those saying China is helping to build the infrastructure of Africa. Yeah they are invested tons...in African Resources! How much do you really think the Africans will benefit much from that?

 

[Poitier]

Similarly, Im disappointed with those saying China is helping to build the infrastructure of Africa. Yeah they are invested tons...in African Resources! How much do you really think the Africans will benefit much from that?

Europeans straight up took resources without developing infrastructure. Resources for infrastructure....... thats how fair trade works and China pays MORE than the norm for resources because of overconsumption

Are you seriously asking if highways, modern housing, sewer systems, schools, etc will benefit Africans

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Europeans straight up took resources without developing infrastructure. Resources for infrastructure....... thats how fair trade works and China pays MORE than the norm for resources because of overconsumption

Are you seriously asking if highways, modern housing, sewer systems, schools, etc will benefit Africans

Of course it would benefit Africans. But let's wait and see how well that works out. Also, I was talking more in the sense of $$$. It's not like China is known for great working conditions and wages.

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

Could get some serious funds through kickstarter too

Similarly, Im disappointed with those saying China is helping to build the infrastructure of Africa. Yeah they are invested tons...in African Resources! How much do you really think the Africans will benefit much from that?

Spoken like someone that hasn't been to Africa.

 

[Poitier]

Of course it would benefit Africans. But let's wait and see how well that works out. Also, I was talking more in the sense of $$$. It's not like China is known for great working conditions and wages.

But they do train the African workers which then allows autonomy... unlike the Europeans who wanted us to always be dependent on them. China has never in their history colonized people outside Asia so I am not worried. China is doing the same trades in Latin America and Russia and I don't see any paranoia from those people.

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Spoken like someone that hasn't been to Africa.

No, I havent. Chinese investment just doesnt much better than previous "foreign investments" in African resources to me. Like I said above, lets wait and see how the infrastructure helps out before lauding the Chinese for it. Also, Id like to know exactly how long the Chinese will own these resources. I cant see the Chinese letting go of that vice grip any time soon (5-10+ years).

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

But they do train the African workers which then allows autonomy... unlike the Europeans who wanted us to always be dependent on them. China has never in their history colonized people outside Asia so I am not worried. China is doing the same trades in Latin America and Russia and I don't see any paranoia from those people.

Thats a fair argument. All Im basically trying to say is lets not applaud their efforts until more of the results are evident.