38. Doors--on the Brink of Profound Change

October 2, 2022

Countries of the Global South and the Global North

Transformation from Commodity Agriculture

Two events important to the future of PH&F

Two certifications--organic and Fair Trade--that had promise but fell short in their efforts to improve the lot of cocoa farmers.

The promise of Bean-to-Bar

December 1 Fundraiser--description

Review of "Ministry for the Future", a non-dystopian view of how we might respond to global warming.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yes, I know. That's not Chopin. It's Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Bobby Krieger, and Jim Donsmore, a fabulous quartet known as The Doors. It was an important part of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. The doors began in 1965, and I believe they lasted seven years. Jim Morrison is buried in the famous Per Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, not too far from Chopin. The doors were a gateway into a period that questioned authority, white supremacy, conventional views of gender and sexuality, established religion, American exceptionalism, and so many other attributes of a culture and a nation giddy with optimism but on the brink of profound change. Welcome to podcast number thirty-eight. Project Hope and Fairness also represents a door to change. In this case, the world is changing, especially in the relationships between rich countries and poor countries, developed versus developing, or the global north and the global south. Before World War II, the countries of the global south were often colonies of the countries of the global north. And by the way, just to confuse everyone, some of the countries in the global south are actually not north of the equator, and some of the global north are not south of the equator. Australia, which is south of the equator, is a member of the global north. And Mexico, which is north of the equator, is a member of the global south. When countries of the global south achieved independence in the 1960s, and of course some like Mexico and other Latin American countries, they achieved independence in the 19th century, but uh they suffer from the same problems. They strove to become less dependent on the developed countries. This proved difficult as international corporations, often owned by the developed countries, worked hard to prevent independence by interfering with a transition from commodity-based agriculture to the transformation of commodities into finished products. And usually blaming lack of infrastructure, education, and mindset. But the world has gotten a lot smaller since those halcyon days, and thanks to the cell phone, I can now call David in Depa, Servando and Pesoin, Keila in Dakar, or Roger in Abidjan and talk business. There's no longer any excuse for the global south to remain mired in the commodity trap. As a nonprofit working in the chocolate market, the mission of Project Hope and Fairness is to help cocoa farmers earn more money by adding value to their commodity. We start by providing the funding to a village or group of villages to form an agricultural cooperative. The cooperative that we help found is not limited to merely buying and selling cocoa beans. It also produces semi-finished products such as cocoa butter and cocoa powder. And it produces finished products such as wholesale or retail chocolate. Any commodity, whether it's wheat, beef, cotton, or cocoa, earns the least profit when it is sold at the bottom of the value chain. Wheat berries are harvested, hauled, grounded to flour, and mixed with water and yeast to make bread. Beef cattle are slaughtered, cut into sides, then into prime cuts, and finally into portions ready for cooking, and finally the meat is cooked, sold, and served. Cotton is extracted, ginned, turned into thread, then fabric, and finally into clothing. And cocoa starts as beans, gets fermented, dried, roasted, ground, and turned into semi-finished products such as cocoa powder or cocoa butter, or finished products such as chocolate. So now I'm closing the door on this exposition and opening the door to uh the second part of this podcast to talk about two events that are important to the future of Project Hope and Fairness. The first event happens between October 28th and November 1st. These dates mark the 27th Salon du Chocolat, which is the largest chocolate event in the world. It is being held in Paris, which is eight hours from my house. I will be joining David Logbozigro, the president of Socoplan, in the Ivorian booth, wa along with two other Ivorian chocolatier. There's a lot of glitter at this event, but underlying all that glitter is a solid and abiding trend, the burgeoning bean to bar movement. At the salon, it's called B2B, although it more accurately should be called BB2B, the extra B being for burgeoning. Big chocolate, that is the enormous companies that control sales in supermarkets throughout the world, has steadfastly maintained that bean to bar is what they've been doing all along. After all, they buy beans and convert them into bars. But parsing words does not always guarantee understanding their meaning. Bean to bar is a movement that began about began about twenty years ago when early pioneers like Frederick Schilling of Dagobah Chocolates bought their first small mélangeur and made their first chocolate in their home kitchens. So just like organic and fair trade, the movement began with the small guys. A hundred years ago, organic started with Rodale in Pennsylvania. And after World War II, the ideals of fair trade began in the United States and in Holland, following a growing trend to recognize that the colonies were going to sue for independence and with it a fairer international trading system. The thing that people said was trade, not aid. Unfortunately, both organic and fair trade have since fallen prey to big capital and big chocolate has adopted the certifications to raise prices and increase profits at the expense, as always, of the cocoa farmer. And many of the small guys, the pioneers of organic and fair trade, have become disgusted and disillusioned. In the global south, the true beneficiaries, which were supposed to be the farmers, are once again the developed nations in the global north. Being to bar represents a different it's different from fair trade and organic. It works equally at both ends of the value chain. And I don't think it can be um stolen from the little guys by the big boys because in this case it's inherently little. That's what it is. Because of, and it's possible because of improvements in communication as well as transportation. It is now possible for cocoa farmers to make their own chocolate and to sell it both in their own country as well as internationally. And individual chocolatiers in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the global north can purchase a roaster, a winnower, and a mélangeur for as little as little as$15,000 and start to sell 300 chocolate bars a week while importing the beans directly from villages or form cooperatives. Thus, bean to bar is more equitable, equitable to everyone, both in the global north and the global south. In the global south, and here I'm talking only about two countries with which I am familiar, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, villages are forming agricultural cooperatives that transform commodities into products, helping their members climb up the value chain and benefiting from the fact that instead of earning a mere four to six percent of the retail dollar, they can be part of an organization, the cooperative, that earns as much as 40% of the retail dollar. This year, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire are allocating significant parts of their national budgets to helping farmers form cooperatives and manufacture finished products. So finally, people are beginning to see the light. I am looking forward to being part of this great humanitarian movement, removing the shackles of the post-colonial systems and growing small businesses that employ more people and earn more money for both growers and the small producers. Especially since the growers are the producers. And a month from now I will do another podcast and describe what I have discovered at the Salon de Chocolat, and I will update you uh on the fundraiser that is happening on December 1st. Uh, which brings us to the second event, the fundraiser. Again, on December 1st. It's at the Monday Club in San Luis Obispo, California, from 5 30 p.m. to eight eight uh uh eight p.m. Prices are$75 per person. This time we are focusing on more videos: production of chocolate and cocoa, harvesting, fermenting, and drying, children going to school, people playing musical instruments, and people making things in small batches. Uh it'll be a night for the cocoa villages. This time, both Don Maruska and I will be on the stage and we'll talk about each video and give you a feeling for how Project Open Fairness is transforming the lives of people who have always been at the mercy of millionaire cocoa traders sitting behind enormous computer screens in London and New York and driving the price of cocoa up and down at their whim in order to make money while the farmer just loses, loses, and loses. But we're going to change that, and we're part of a growing movement that is changing that. At the fundraiser, we'll be selling African Choco bars, hot cocoa mix, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs, all made in the factory of Soco Plan, the cooperative that we helped establish in 2019. We will also be selling African Choco Fudge bars, which I will be making here in France from the Soco Plan chocolate. Eventually, those bars will be made at the cooperative that we established only a few months ago in Pesouan. Uh that is called Scap, Societe Cooperative Agricole de Pesouan. Um, and then Pesouan is going to be making a new mystery product, and it's a mystery because I'm not quite sure it's going to happen. But uh I'm sending a video over to Servando and he's going to start making it happen. Uh, and we'll I'll be able to tell you in the next podcast whether the mystery product has uh is taking shape. If you want to get an early jump on the videos, just click on the link provided in the written portion of this podcast, located just below the link you already clicked on to listen to this podcast. And now we come to part three, which is a brief review of a book that I bought on audible.com and listened to over and over. It's about global warming, and this is a subject that is that I've been thinking about for a while now. The book is called Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and it was one of President Obama's favorites for 2020. It's a non-dystopian view of how if humans were better beings than we actually are, we might constructively deal with global warming. I found the book instructive, fun, and I wish I could believe that it were even 50% accurate. I guess President Obama is at heart an optimist and doesn't like to read material that sullies his vision. Uh besides being unrealistic in terms of human behavior, it's most unusual structurally. The book has a hundred and six chapters, some only four minutes long, and others forty minutes long. At times it's terse, as if written in a pocket-sized notebook. In chapters that involve the storyline, there is always a narrator, but because there are multiple stories, the narrator varies. The chapters differ in focus. As mentioned, some move the storyline forward. Others are short essays, such as on economics, physics, and geology, all related in some way to how we're going to deal with global warming and what causes it. For example, economics uh chapters might contribute material associated with developing a worldwide currency called the Carboni, which is part of the main story. Each carboni uh represents one ton of carbon sequestered in the ground. When you consider that currencies are mostly based on faith, that is faith in a country's future, faith that gold will endure. Uh this notion isn't so far-fetched. The role of the Ministry for the Future is to provide uh uh backup to one's faith and how much carbon has actually been sequestered and therefore uh how good the carboni uh how valuable it really is. Another economics chapter talks about the Bretton Woods meetings, uh, which everybody should know about because it was so important uh to the notion of fair notion of fairness. And um the Bretton Woods meetings, which happened, I believe, in 1947, uh, and they he talks about uh the R author talks about uh gives you a historic backdrop uh to concerns about equity and justice between individuals and countries. The chapters on physics talk about photons of life, light, and how they are absorbed by the atmosphere and retained because of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Or the chapters uh might uh on physics might talk about wet bulb versus dry bulb temperatures and uh the limits to of the human body to enduring heat. Uh chapters on geology describe efforts in Antarctica to stop the glaciers from flowing into the sea and raising global war uh sea levels, and also in the Arctic to prevent melting of the polar ice cap, which reflects solar energy and uh reduces absorption of heat and ocean warming. The time period of the book begins in 2024 and ends sometime in the mid-2040s. The main story follows two characters, Mary and Frank. Mary is the ministry's director, and Frank is a man who experienced the death of 22 million Indians while on assignment in Looknow, and who became radicalized against carbon-burning corporations and oligarchs. Frank attempts to uh kidnap Mary, but ends up becoming a lifelong friend uh after serving time in prison, um, and actually convinces her that the ministry is impotent and insufficiently sensitive to the magnitude of the global warming problem. Overall, the tone of the book is frustratingly positive, at least for this fundamental pessimist. By its time, by its end, it looks like the earth has been saved, although Los Angeles gets completely wiped off the planet, along with Hollywood. I guess that's for uh to pay us pessimists a l a little mind. LA's demise is caused by an atmospheric river, which we read about a couple months ago in the New York Times. Um, all of California's Central Valley was turned uh into a 20-foot deep lake in 1881 by an atmospheric river. Um, and the message here is such a thing can happen again, and because of global warming, it will be much worse than a mere central valley being flooded to the depth of 20 feet. Since I started reading Ministry for the Future, Pakistan has lost one third of its land to a lake thanks to a monsoon ri season gone awry due to global warming. And Hurricane Ian has just done breathe breathtaking damage to her Florida and to South Carolina. Many lives have been ruined and lost. These country shattering events are only going to become more common and uh and uh as the book mentions. So is the book worth reading? I think so. Um I think we humans have to really pull together if we are to survive. It's not at all naively optimistic to believe that we can make the necessary changes. Where there is a will, there is a way. I actually it's the inverse. There are many ways, just not wills. Okay, that's my pessimistic version. Okay, well, we end this podcast with another classic by the doors, Riders on the Storm. See you in mid-November. And thanks for listening.