Canadians who purchase chocolate to celebrate the Easter holiday are questioning if the treats are more expensive than it is been before. Inflation is one explanation for the seeming spike in prices, as one expert describes to Yahoo Canada that a deficiency in one crucial component — cacao — has had a global impact on production.
While inflation has certainly affected the price of numerous grocery staples, food investigator Nino Bariola says there’s more going on when considering chocolate. Bariola, a postdoctoral associate with the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto, says there is presently a substantial universal deficiency of cacao. This comes as a consequence of the threats to cacao manufacture in West African countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana, which yield a large slice of the global supply – 40 percent and 20 percent respectively. Several factors have led to this outcome.
A very significant factor has to do with the conditions of manufacture of cacao in these countries — chiefly in monoculture, which renders cacao plantations more vulnerable to disease, he informs Yahoo Canada. Another critical factor, that complexes its effects with diseases, is environmental change, given that cacao trees grow within the tropics only. According to barchart.com, which trails market information, Ivory Coast farmers dispatched 29% less cacao to ports from Oct. 1 to March 10, compared to the same time a year prior.
Bariola states that a significant question at stake is that the deficiency, along with the increasing price of cacao in West Africa, can put other tropical forests around the world, such as the Amazon, in danger. Since cacao is only cultivated within the tropics, the burden will likely grow to deforestation of natural forests outside West Africa to substitute them with cacao trees, he says. We are already noticing that cacao manufacture in Ecuador increased extensively this past year, even surpassing Ghana. He extends that even though some may think that this can produce positive effects for cacao campesino cultivators, it can also have disturbing effects in the Amazon rainforest.
Bariola says Canadian buyers are certainly already seeing an upsurge in the price of chocolate as a direct consequence of the cacao shortage. While some customers may not have perceived these surges yet, they will likely become even more noticeable in the future, he says. A statement issued in February by senior food and beverage expert Billy Roberts at CoBank found that retail chocolate prices are up roughly 17% over two years and will continue to rise. But that’s seemingly not discouraging buyers.
