Ivory Coast: A Tale of Chocolate and Guns

Ivory Coast is the world’s top exporter of cocoa, which the world depends on for chocolate. However lately it has been making headlines for other reasons. Keywords, such as - civil war, power struggle, internal strife, coup d’etat - likely to google “Ivory Coast” faster, cocoa only if you are patient enough. The Strife-torn Ivory Coast is a ‘not so uncommon’ vignette especially from Africa. It's rather painful that Ivory Coast, once hailed as a model of stability with decades of economic prosperity since its independence in 1960, has slipped into a blood-soaked civil war in the past twelve years.

Source: ACLED

The cocoa export in Ivory Coast has been plagued by corruption for years. Since the early eighties, a host of institutional changes and macroeconomic structural problems resulted in the deterioration of cocoa export standards, labor rights abuses and thriving black markets. The pain was compounded by a series of social and political crisis. The xenophobic “Ivoirite” policy based on the exclusion of immigrant workers from other countries led up to an attempted coup in 1999 and subsequently into civil conflict in 2002, which divided the country by the cultural fault line between Muslims in the north, and the Christian majority of the economically prosperous south. The poverty rate rose from 10 % in 1985 to around 50 % in 2008.

Source: Author's calculation

As the long-anticipated presidential election (held in October, 2010) morphed into a political limbo, cocoa exports was locked in a deadly power struggle between the renegade incumbent Laurent Gbagbo - who refused to relinquish power despite losing the election and Alassane Ouattara, a 'non-Ivoirite' - the current president with the support of world leaders. The situation worsened when Ouattara imposed an embargo on the export of cocoa beans to financially stifle his rival, Gbagbo - as almost 7 million (out of 21 million) people live off the cocoa in Ivory Coast. There is a long way go to make cocoa sustainable for farmers to support development and not exploitation. It also mandates the growth of Fair Trade cocoa farming with the big companies such as Hershey to start sourcing certified cocoa.

The least we can do - as you bite into a chocolate just spare a thought for the young children perhaps enjoying the bitter taste of it in the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast!