23. Stories About Depa, Pezoan, and Cordes sur Ciel

April 15, 2021

My commitment to "do something" about poverty of the cocoa farmer.  Purchase of tools for farmers.  2012 trip: I proposed the idea of building cocoa processing facility in Depa.  Since 2019, David Logbo Zigro has shipped four batches of chocolate bars to the US.  He has also made bars and disks which he has sold locally.

Pezoan:  We built the second chocolate processing facility in Pezoan and I have been teaching Adama Yamba how to temper chocolate and candy fruit.  Antoine's story about getting beaten up doing PH&F work.  Adama's story with the cold room.

Cordes sur Ciel:  selling in the Saturday market.  Damien joins me.  Dreams about expanding business.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 2:02

That's the beginning of the prelude and fugue in F major, a difficult piece that involves a lot of pedal work. Because my long, clunky feet, attached to long lanky legs, cause a lot of noise as well as wear and tear on the pedals, I went to the lumber yard and got two blocks of wood to raise the bench by four centimeters. This facilitates foot flexibility and reduces noise and wear and tear on the organ, which Andrew, the owner, is surely happy to know, as he built the pedal frame himself and has no desire to rebuild it because some stiff old man tackled one of Bach's more challenging compositions. As usual, I have saved the bulk of the piece for the end of this podcast. But today my podcast is not about hydrogen, as I promised, but it's about chocolate bars from Africa because I wanted to keep people up to date on what's happening. As you know from previous podcasts, uh the international chocolate industry depends on child labor and on the enforced poverty of the West African cocoa farmer. I had first learned about poverty and the cocoa farmer in 2003 when I traveled for the first time to Ghana. The goal of that trip was to give a seminar at the University of Legon in Ghana, near Accra, to develop a lecture about West African cuisine from my food anthropology course back in California, and to investigate the development potential of the Fair Trade certification system as a method for helping cocoa farmers out of abject poverty forced on them by the colonial and now post-colonial world orders. From 2003 to 2012, I devoted two to three weeks of every summer to visiting Fair Trade Cooperatives in Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and Cameroon. I trumped, not trumped, oh God, bad word, through cocoa farms, interviewed cocoa farmers, their families, village chiefs, warehouse managers, and anyone else involved in the cocoa industry. In 2006, I registered Project Open Fairness with the IRS as a licensed American NGO. This became my commitment to do more than just decry the current state of affairs and to actually do something. Years of teaching at a university and of uh attending one fruitless meeting after another, one develops a hunger to actually accomplish something. On virtually all my trips, I brought one, two, or three eco-tourists of all ages, university students interested in international development, people my age, and even my mother, Dorothy, who was in her late 80s. She came with me twice. I wanted my co-travelers to witness firsthand the realities of the cocoa growing West African village, because what you hear and read about does not always correspond to reality. In each of the three countries we visited, Ghana, Co d'Ivoire, and Cameroon, we would purchase farm implements in the city and then distribute them in villages. As many as 15 villages. These implements included cutlasses or machetes, boots, sharpening stones, books and pens for children, work clothes, solar electric lights, digging tools, and laptops for promising students. We also planned and paid for public restrooms, wells, sewing rooms, and cargo tricycles for moving produce to market. Despite these many accomplishments, I grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of interest among Americans I talked to regarding the essential unfairness of the chocolate industry. I decided that I wanted to do, if I wanted to make any kind of a mark, I would have to dream up some grander scheme. And thus was born during my 2012 trip to Côte d'Ivoire, the notion of building village food production facilities. This idea germinated when I asked the chiefs of Depa and Pesouin, two villages located in the Haute-Sassandre region of Côte d'Ivoire. I asked them this question If I were to do something bigger than just distributing tools, what might it be? Their first response was we need trucks for collecting cocoa beans and taking them to market. As soon as they said this, a 2005 interview with the head of Cargill West Africa popped into my mind. This is an interview I did. I had asked them what Cargill had done for the cocoa farmer. It is one of the world's top uh Cargill is one of the world's top five agribusiness corporations. It controls a large part of Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa industry. The director told me that they had donated trucks, but that the villages neglected to maintain them, and so the project didn't uh stand up to the test of time. I decided that if a giant corporation couldn't do the job right, who was I to think that I could do a better job? After all, on the bell-shaped distribution curve for organized individuals, I'm in the lower half. I asked the chiefs what else might be of use? Their second choice was build a rice hauling facility. Now you might ask at this point, how is it that two chiefs on two separate occasions and in two different villages came up with the same answer? And my answer is I don't know. They just did. But maybe it's because everybody grows rice and it's a constant frustration for women of women that they have to uh um grow the rice, dry the rice, winnow the rice, pound the rice, cook the rice. Uh it's a lot of work. So maybe that's why two chiefs came up with the same answer. Shortly after the 2012 trip, when they made the when they made that statement, uh, I met Celia Zance at a showing of the of uh the documentary Dark Side of Chocolate in my house. Um, formerly married to Charles Mingus, the jazz musician, and Saul Zance, the movie producer. Celia uh was very Celia had money, but she didn't spend it on herself. She spent it on um uh other people. Um but she was very impressed with the movie that I had shown and with the ideas that I had expressed. She asked me what I would do with$10,000 if she were to give it to me. I told her I would build a rice hauling facility paired with a small room for making chocolate. My idea was that such a facility would accomplish two things. It would alleviate the daily travail associated with rice processing and cooking, which is done mostly by women, and it would bring more money to the cocoa farmer, and most of the cocoa farmers are men. The building would thus be a solution for both genders. Seely gave me the money, and I hired a contractor to oversee the construction of a rice hauling facility in Depa and a small chocolate room. The villages were ecstatic because virtually every woman in the region spends, as I said, hours with rice. And of course, every man spends his life weeding, trimming, and harvesting of cocoa trees, all for pittance. During the fall of 2012, work started on the rice and chocolate facility in Depah. Then, shortly before my departure for Côte d'Ivoire in June of 2013, while sitting in a restaurant in New York City, I found out that the$1,500 electric motor that I had just paid for had been stolen. So I had to send another$1,500 for a second motor in order to take photos and pictures of Depons happily milling their rice. So I was in New York, I get that bad message, I send the money, and then by the time I got there, they had bought another electric motor. Also, shortly before leaving for Africa, I bought a$500 chocolate making machine, uh, which is called a mélangeur. It's got two granite stones rotating against another stone, and it uh is the oldest uh machine that was ever designed for making chocolate. Um I put it in, I bought a clunky, uh a new but cheap suitcase and put the machine in that and carried it with me all the way to Iceland, then France, and then to Côte d'Ivoire. Once I arrived, uh David Logbo Zero and I were able to take obtain pictures and video of rice hulling and also of making chocolate. The chocolate machine held five pounds of product, so David and I roasted about three pounds of beans, and dozens of children helped us haul the beans, which they did quite joyfully, knowing that within 24 hours they would be each remunerated with a lovely piece of chocolate. We made about 400 quarter ounce discs and wrapped each in a colorful foil square, then took the chocolate discs around to neighboring villages after paying off our workers. In the ensuing years, we have built new chocolate-related buildings in DAPA, purchased five different processing machines, run a three-phase 220 line from one end of DAPA to the other, built a chocolate wrapping room, and then last year in 2020 purchased a new chocolate machine from the US that is a very high-quality machine and it's making chocolate so smooth that it really compares favorably to chocolates in the best brands. We also built a rice hulling and chocolate making facility in nearby Pezoan in 2015, starting in 2015. The chocolate room in Pesuan's facility has a walk-in closet where they can cool chocolate down to 15 degrees centigrade, that's 55 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to make it harden in the molds. It should be noted that the rice hauling facilities of both villages are managed by the villages, and never once have I had to pay a dime for upkeep. They managed to pay for it themselves, which I think is just glorious. About two years ago in 2019, uh David met Mark Steen. David is the guy that I work with in DEPA. Um, and he met Mark Steen, who's the director of Mocha, Maximizing Opportunities in Cocoa Activity, which is one of the ongoing projects of a Washington-based nonprofit called CNFA or Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture. Last year, Mr. Steen awarded David$25,000 as part of a$14.6 million Food for Progress grant that comes from the USDA. Um, and is focused primarily on productivity and efficiency of actors in the value cocoa value chain. This money, um, uh the$25,000, has partly paid for the construction of buildings to house cocoa processing machinery. So they tore down the old buildings that David had made out of mud and put in ones that are have made out of concrete block with concrete floors. Um, and uh then they've uh also able to pay for three new machines uh that had uh really two of them are completely new. One is a cocoa press from China that makes it possible to press out cocoa butter so David doesn't have to drive all the way to Abidjan to buy cocoa butter, he can make it himself. Uh the another second machine is a winnower from the United States. Um, that's only$2,500 and um it breaks it takes the uh it separates the chaff from the inside of the bean. And then a third machine is a tempering machine uh from Canada that will uh make it a lot easier to make good-looking bars because tempering is a tricky thing. All of those uh machines were paid for, all three, uh, and they are currently on their way to Côte d'Ivoire. Since 2019, David has shipped four batches of chocolate bars to the U.S. Two years ago, I discovered that DHL would ship 50 kilos, uh, which amounts to 1,600 one-ounce chocolate bars, from Abidjan to San Luis Obispo, California. Um, this meant that transportation costs were about 35 cents a bar, which is a lot less than the$2 a bar that I had been quoted before. Uh 35 cents a bar, of course, is astronomical. I mean, uh, if I were to send the bars by container, um, it would be one cent a bar. And that's what drives the whole chocolate industry. It would be impossible uh to get inexpensive chocolate, even with the slavery, even with the child labor, even with the poverty of the cocoa farmers, if they didn't send everything by container. Uh shipping around by plane is not a long-term solution. But we're trying to, you know, we've got to start somewhere. But anyway, since then, Project Open Fairness has been importing David's bars to the U.S. at Christmas, every Christmas. And I encourage friends to buy$100 worth of bars, which they can then send as part of their Christmas presents. Uh,$100 is of bars is amounts to 40 bars. And most people have 40 friends, so it's not an astronomical amount. And a lot of people spend way more than that on gifts, and these are gifts that actually are helping some people. The cruel death of George Floyd, uh now we're in the last days before All Hell Breaks Loose in Minneapolis, I'm afraid. But anyway, the cruel death of George Floyd added a new impetus to our efforts. At first, I was inspired to develop a Black Lives Matter chocolate bar, but the Black Lives Matter movement folks never responded to any of my suggestions or questions. So then I asked a friend, uh Abe Onichoi, a Nigerian artist, whose paintings of Nigerian village life I own and admire. Um, and he's a very much admired artist in San Luis Obispo. I asked him whether he could help us develop a bar, uh, that is help us develop a name and help us develop a look. And thanks to his imagination and uh and thanks also to a graphics artist who prefers not to be named, uh, but who's been wonderful. Um both of those two people have been absolutely uh wonderful. Um, they've both donated their time to the cause. And uh so I've been able to develop three lines of chocolate bars, uh, which will be produced either by David in Depa or Adama Yamba in Pesouan. Um so that first line of chocolate bars is called the African Choco Bar. The second line of chocolate bars is called the African Choco Fudge Bar. It's a 32-gram bar with a bittersweet shell and a fudge interior. The fudge is easy to make in a non-dairy tropical country. You know, there are no, they don't have cows uh because of tsitsi flies, you know, so the dairy doesn't exist. And um, so buying heavy cream to make ganache is just not feasible. But however, fudge made with condensed milk, which comes in a can, that is quite feasible. And condensed milk is a common ingredient in Côte d'Ivoire, especially in hotels, because uh they make uh cafe au lait with it. Um so the fudge is made is made of uh dark chocolate heated in a microwave with sweetened condensed milk and butter, uh both of which are easily obtained. Uh so now that at this point there are uh three flavors of the fudge bar vanilla, candied orange peel, and peanuts. I'm also toying with some other flavors such as hazelnuts for the European market. But they don't have hazelnuts in Côte d'Ivoire, uh, and if they were to they would if they were to buy them, they would be too expensive. And I thought it's much better to use local ingredients. So maybe the next one will be candied pineapple. I've already uh investigated how to candy pineapples and that they can easily do it. Uh and the pineapples on Ivory Coast is number four in the world for pineapples. Oranges uh in Côte d'Ivoire are common. Uh, you know, oranges in the tropical world are not orange, they are green because in order for an orange to become orange, if it's not dyed with orange dye, uh which is what they used to do, I think they still do, may, in Florida. Um, but um in California, the reason that oranges are orange is because the nights are cold. And the when the night goes down to 50 degrees, it causes the pigments to go from green, the chlorophyll to be uh oxidized, and then you get the orange, uh the carotenoids that give you the orange color. Uh but they don't get that in Ivory Coast because it's tropical country, they don't have cold nights. And then also the third flavor is peanuts, and peanuts are easily available. Um peanuts are grown, huge amounts of peanuts are grown in nearby in next door or almost next door, Senegal, and they also grow peanuts in Côte d'Ivoire. Recently, I have been working with Adama of Peswan to teach him how to make the fudge bar. Thanks to YouTube and to my cell phone, I have recorded videos on how to make the bars and also how to wrap them. Adama was having problems with getting them to set, that is, to get the heart the chocolate to harden so that you could knock the bars out of the molds. Uh they would just cling to the molds, they would not pull away, the chocolate would not pull away from the plastic mold. Uh and so this despite much repetition and uh that uh I kept telling him, you know, it's it's temperature, the temperature is what you need. You gotta get it down to uh 15 degrees centigrade in order to get it to harden. But he he he didn't um until we bought thermometers for him, he didn't really have a way of knowing what temperature the air conditioner was reaching in the cold room. Um all this uh brouhaha around getting him to uh to to chill the bars correctly all happened around the time that Perseverance landed on Mars. And that very, very exciting event made me realize that um, you know, it's sort of what I'm trying to do is sort of like what NASA's trying to do, you know, landing an aircraft, a craft, a spacecraft on a foreign planet, uh, and trying to get uh somebody who doesn't use thermometers in a country where thermometers aren't even available, not easy to get. Um and people just don't know about the concept of temperature. Uh they just, you know, it's everything is tropical. And so, you know, and it almost never goes below 70, except in the depths of winter, and it almost and it rarely goes above 95. So, you know, um it's a it's very moderate uh tropical place. So I was trying to accomplish something at a great distance uh and using YouTube to try to communicate with a About the importance of temperature. Adama may may have lacked in technic technological awareness and experience, uh, but he sure uh is a very enthusiastic person. So enthusiasm really is far more important than uh education. You know, I mean education is great, but if you don't have enthusiasm, you're just not gonna get anywhere. Anyway, so I went to the local hardware store called Akencaillari here in France, and I bought a simple Walmoun Setigrade thermometer for the cold room, and a much more expensive infrared thermometer so Adama could uh learn to reliably temper the chocolate. As um tempering requires delicate fiddling with temperature. Uh eventually you become so good at it that you don't need a thermometer. But really, it's like training wheels on a bicycle. You need that thermometer to get to the to the point where you start to observe and see what's going on with the chocolate uh when you're tempering it. Also, so I I sent in a box uh those two thermometers, and I also sent uh some labels and some bars that I had made so he could taste the bars and see how I wrapped them. I sent the package and the pa uh and it took three weeks. Actually, it it arrived in three days, but the Côte d'Ivoire uh postal service didn't bother to phone Antoine, the chief's uh spokesman for whom Adama was working for. So um after three weeks, I I said, You better check on this because um I they're gonna throw it in the trash if you don't go find out what's going on with that box. Um and so uh Antoine had to d go all the way to Abby John six hours. And at first they said, Oh no, we don't have the package, it we threw it out. Um But then he it turns out that they did have it. I don't know exactly the details, but he finally got the package with the thermometers and the chocolate bars and the wrappers inside. But uh on the way out, on his way the way to his son's house, uh, four men jumped him and beat him severely, stole his wallet and his money, and left him for dead in the street. I don't know why, but they did not take the package. Antoine spent two days in the hospital recovering from his wounds. He had a lot of um belly wounds from being punched in the belly. And then he took transportation back to the village. Um I sent him$300 to reimburse him for his losses. That's what he wanted.$300. So I gave him what he wanted. Uh Antoine um is also as enthusiastic as Adama. He's uh probably in his 50s. Um I helped him, I I I cured him of a typhoid fever a year ago. He almost died of it and uh uh because of bad water. And then so then he gets uh after typhoid fever, then he gets beaten up. He's very cheerful and he loves this project. So um I really appreciate that. So once Antoine made it back to Peswan, Adama used a wall-hanging thermometer to test the temperature of the cold room. I asked him to photograph the thermometer so I could read the temperature, and of course, the WhatsApp has been fantastic for this kind of thing and use instant feedback. Um so I looked at what it said and it said 24 degrees centigrade. And I said to Adama, you know, 24 degrees is not 15 degrees. Uh 15 is halfway between 10 and 20. You need to go to that line. Um, and so um so then I asked him to to put the thermometer in the vent of the air conditioner and to measure the temperature of the air as it came out. And surprise, surprise, it was 24 degrees. Um so I said to him, Well, either the you need to call the people who sold you that air conditioner and tell them that it's broken, or um maybe uh you're not using it right. And uh, I don't know. So again, I'm like Perseverance landing on Mars here. Um so I I asked him, Well, why don't you uh why don't you find the remote? Where's the remote? Um, and show me uh what temperature the remote is set at. Well fortunately, it was set at 24. So that means that explains why it was 24 degrees. Um I said, well, no, you gotta set it to 15. We gotta get it down to 15. So uh half an hour later, the chocolate pulled away from the mold. Eureka Adama was so pleased. He was pleased, please, pleased with himself, and I was very happy for him because, you know, again, you know, enthusiasm is really what really counts. Uh, and he's enthusiastic. He really wants this project to work, and so does Antoine. Uh, yesterday I made a video showing how to wrap the bars, and now um a friend of mine has ordered 90 of them, and Adama is going to make them and wrap them in foil, and then he'll ship them to me in France, and then I will put them the paper on them and ship them on to the United States. Uh, just for now, even though you know that costs a lot more, um, I just prefer to uh take a look at the product and and uh you know look at uh do a little quality control on the way. But anyway, we're making progress. During the time I've been teaching Adama, I have also set up a truffle making operation here in court. So uh I'm also looking to uh set up a business uh in France and then hopefully in Europe uh that's using David's chocolate. So the David or David ships me chocolate in small boxes lined with plastic bags. The boxes end up weighing two kilograms, which is the limit uh before the French government would charge uh customs duties. So at two kilograms, it cost me um overall, it cost me 25 uh Euros per kilo, which is an astronomically high number. But you have to start somewhere again, you know. I mean, I uh the whole business is based on uh on shipping in containers, and I uh you know, y but that a container costs 200,000 euros, you know, to buy the chocolate and uh and ship it. That's uh it's 10,000 euros to ship a container and then 190,000 or so for the chocolate. So it's you know, I have to uh you know, you have to start out small. Um anyway, that's uh that's the lesson that um I'm finding that I'm learning. During the last three weeks I have sold truffles and bars made with David's chocolate at the Saturday morning market here in Court. I set up a big beach umbrella to shade my tiny metal table, and under a glass bell jar I display fifteen different flavors of truffles and five different flavors of chocolate bars. I also distribute literature about our project and talk to people about it. This coming Friday, that's tomorrow, a young man uh who specializes in cooking for local Brits, as there are a lot of uh British people uh who have bought houses in this area despite Brexit. Um, and he he's joining me. So he's gonna work with me, and we're gonna make uh some things tomorrow, and then on Saturday he will learn how to sell. Sell. My plan is that eventually we would expand our sales to San Antonio de Noble Val, which is about twenty-five kilometers away, and a medieval town like Cord, but much bigger and has a big market with a lot of British.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

I am also hoping to start a non-profit company here in Cord that will make chocolates for sale in a store. Maybe along the Grand Rue de l'Orloche, where all the tourists uh enter the town. It's a cobblestone street that goes up the hill to the uh medieval part of the town, which was built in the early 13th century. And I'm also showing chocolate on the hill called Cord Oba or Cord at the bottom. It uh specializes in local products, including wines, liquors, and local meat, jams, and jellies, local cakes, quad gras, and chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

And so if you're interested in merchandising your products or in getting involved in some other freaking way, let me know.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

My email address is ew new out at w n e U H A U S at gmail.com or help our mission to make cocoa farming a sustainable occupation by making a donation. Either visit www.project openers.org and hold out the donation and click the donate button or donation.