Bitter Chocolate
The chronic crisis in the cocoa industry has contributed to Côte d’Ivoire's slide into civil war in two ways. First, and most significant, the persistent poverty and stagnation causes war. Second, the ethnic tensions, which arose in the cocoa industry itself, gave unscrupulous politicians the chance to make a bad situation even worse, for their personal gain. At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly CFA 1,600 per kilo. The farmers are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. The Ivorian agents of Cargill, ADM, and Barry Callebaut offer much less than the world price. The corrupt government takes a big bite in "official" taxes. Finally, the farmers pay bribes at police roadblocks. Côte d’Ivoire over the past decades has done just about everything mainstream Western economists suggested -- and it remains trapped in poverty. The country concentrated on growing and exporting products it was "good" at, cocoa and also coffee, instead of trying to industrialize. But the chronically low world prices for these products kept the country poor. With better prices -- a little more like what protected and subsidized farmers in the US and Western Europe earn -- millions in the cocoa-growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire could have started to consume more themselves, which in turn would have promoted local industries, reduced unemployment, and gradually raised the country's standard of living. Every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire. The crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is representative of deeply rooted structural problems in many other African nations.
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/159707/roots-cote-divoire-crisis
Dissolving post-colonialist states
The other day a diplomat offered his serious opinion that in fifty years the Central African Republic will no longer exist. Each neighboring country will subsume the part extending out from the shared border. We are at the end of the road, he said. This prognosis strikes me as the most hopeful of any I have heard. It is more realistic than assuming that the aid directed here will bring about a turnaround in the governance of the CAR state, which is largely privatized. Life expectancy in CAR drops by six months each year. For men, it is now 39.2. On a continent that has seen its population skyrocket in recent decades, CAR's has stagnated for 25 years and remains at a measly 3.9 million in an area the size of France and Spain combined. Meanwhile, everything is imported -- even manioc, the staple food, -- and importing is hugely expensive -- and quite profitable for Cameroon, from whence most products arrive. If dissolving the CAR state seems like sacrilege under the principles of sovereignty that govern the international system, and maybe especially African Union-era Africa, or if it seems like some flavor of lack of solidarity with CAR (a put-down, in the sense that they could not make a go of it on their own), I would argue that such points of view reflect a lack of the kind of creative thinking that could actually help the people who live in this literal center of the continent.
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