Coco cultivation in Africa is going to get a boost in the coming days. The world’s renowned chocolate maker –Nestle- is hopeful to innovate a new pedigree of chocolate, without adding sugar. Does it taste bitter? No, says the company officials. According to them, the sweetener to be added to the chocolate will also come from cocoa plants, which will be a natural ingredient, extracted from the plant itself. Undoubtedly, this will be good news for the growing number of chocolate lovers in the world, who avoid the wonder sweet because of the presence of higher quantum of sugar content and fear obesity.
Now, they can have the chocolate to their heart’s content. Nestle, will convert the white pulp in cocoa beans, which contains natural sugar into a sweet powder, nay, a healthy sweetener. The company will market the chocolate bars under two different product profiles: 70 percent dark chocolate and 30 percent less sugar chocolates. This is part of the effort being made by the company to be known as a healthy chocolate maker. In 2018 itself, the company’s less sugar chocolate accounted for less than 30%, which it would focus to increase in the coming years.
Cocoa is cultivated in the tropical regions (around the Equator). The hot and humid climate is most suited for cocoa cultivation. Significantly, West Africa accounts for 70% of the world’s cocoa beans. Countries in that belt are Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The Ivory Coast and Ghana account for most of the production in the West African belt. The other cocoa-producing countries are Indonesia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Brazil and Ecuador.
The scenario changes when the chocolate producing countries are concerned. Four countries rule the roost. They are the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. Western Europe produces 35% of total world chocolate production., while the U.S. accounts for 28%. The flip side is that none of the major producers of chocolate are major sources of cocoa, and none of the major cocoa-producing countries are major chocolate manufacturing centers. Interestingly, this paradox has been taken up by both www.trendsnafrica.com and Africa4U from time to time.
A related issue is the skewed distribution of income from cocoa production. While the cocoa farmers in Western Africa is reeling under abject poverty and selling off their produces at throwaway prices to the middlemen and others, the big companies in the West are making a killing just by value-adding to the product. The other issue that has been posed is how much money a person has to shell out for buying a small bar of chocolate. If a cocoa farmer is getting, on an average US$2 per day as his wage, he has to shell out US$2.5 for buying a small bar of chocolate, produced from his own crop. It is indeed, a paradox
