Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 18, 2014

World’s largest chocolate producer: We are running out of Chocolate!!!

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 1:23 AM

I hear <Silence> just before all hell breaks loose as millions of women freak out at the same time after reading this headline 🙂 and no, this is not a joke, Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut who are the worlds largest producers of chocolate have the numbers to prove that we (and by we I mean you all, since I don’t really like chocolate that much) are eating more coco than is being produced. Last year farmers produced 70,000 metric tons less than the amount consumed and the trend is increasing. By 2020 this number is expected to rise to 1 million metric ton. Ouch!.

The problem is, for one, a supply issue. Dry weather in West Africa (specifically in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced) has greatly decreased production in the region. A nasty fungal disease known as frosty pod hasn’t helped either. The International Cocoa Organization estimates it has wiped out between 30 percent and 40 percent of global cocoa production. Because of all this, cocoa farming has proven a particularly tough business, and many farmers have shifted to more profitable crops, like corn, as a result.

Then there’s the world’s insatiable appetite for chocolate. China’s growing love for the stuff is of particular concern. The Chinese are buying more and more chocolate each year. Still, they only consume per capita about 5 percent of what the average Western European eats. There’s also the rising popularity of dark chocolate, which contains a good deal more cocoa by volume than traditional chocolate bars (the average chocolate bar contains about 10 percent, while dark chocolate often contains upwards of 70 percent).

Looking at this article I am tempted to start stocking up on chocolate and in a few years time I can sell them for 10 times the price… All I will have to do is figure out how to keep my sister and other friends from eating up my stash before I sell them. 😉 I believe that will be an impossible task now that I think about it in more detail.

If there was a similar article about caffeine then I would be one of the people freaking out, but since it is ‘just’ chocolate I am fine and not worried. So I will go back and finish my book then go to sleep.

You can read more details about the issue at the Washington Post and Bloomberg.org site.

Story Via: Slashdot.org

– Suramya

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