Late last year it was announced that the venerable Wilbur
Chocolate Company in Lititz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, would close its
factory there at the end of December, although keeping the shop and museum open
(and moving the manufacturing elsewhere).
The closing gutted the economic life of the downtown area. Taking more than a hundred jobs away also
took away a lot of other business.
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| Yeah. We thought they were kidding, too. |
Is this the beginning of the end? Not if we have anything to say about it — we
love the smell of cocoa in the morning.
It smells like . . . victory.
Nevertheless, there is a problem, actually several
problems. As detailed in the Wall Street Journal of Thursday, January
14, 2016 (“Chocolate Makers Fight Melting Supply,” pp. A1, A10), there is a
growing crisis in the production of cocoa, one of the few commodities that has
experienced rising prices.
It seems that, in common with other aging capital and
infrastructure throughout the world, cocoa trees are not being maintained
properly, nor are worn-out units (i.e.,
“trees”) being taken out of production while new ones are planted. This is serious, because (according to the
article) it normally takes a cocoa tree two to four years to start producing,
and its top production years are between the ages of ten and twenty. After that, production goes down until it
finally stops altogether.
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| Food of the gods, okay, but be careful which gods. . . . |
Added to that is the fact that there have been some
unseasonably dry years, and farmers’ revenue from cocoa has declined, even as the
price of cocoa powder goes up. To cut
costs, they scrimp on fertilizer and other things, such as pruning, weeding,
and disease control, with the result that production goes down even more. Some experts think that with improved
techniques and adequate water and fertilizer existing trees could increase
yields up to 300% . . . in the short to mid-term.
Some farmers have tried grafting young trees on to old,
existing rootstock. This has decreased
the time it takes to get a tree producing from two to four years down to nine
months. The drawback is that this seems
to make the young trees more susceptible to diseases that were in the old
rootstock (which apparently is strong enough to resist it), but that might not
show up for a year or more. Exacerbating
the problem is the fact that some farmers got money to plant new trees, but
spent the money on other things.
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| The world must be made safe for cocoa |
In short, in order to increase production in the short- to
mid-term, it is essential that better techniques be implemented immediately to
bring existing trees up to their full potential. This will require massive education efforts,
as well as infusions of capital in a form that cannot be diverted to other
purposes.
In order to sustain and increase production in the mid- to
long-term, non- and low-producing trees must be replaced as fast as
possible. Given that it takes two to
four years to get a tree into production, and ten years for full production,
with an estimated useful life of ten years, each year 10% of the total trees
that will be needed in ten years — not 10% of current needs, 10% of future
needs — should be planted. Within two to
four years there will be a return from the new trees, with full production in
ten, and optimized production in twenty . . . if this is done every year, and
existing trees are properly maintained.
The question then becomes how best can this be done, where
to get the money, and how to ensure as far as humanly possible that the money
is used for the intended purposes.