Far Worse Than Peak Oil

While the looming prospect of running out of oil reserves is staring the world in the face, there is another commodity -- one that for some people even is more precious -- that we may have to learn to live without: chocolate! No more candy bars. No more cocoa. No more chocolate pudding. No more chocolate bubble baths. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!

According to an article in The Independent, "The world could run out of affordable chocolate within 20 years." For once, global warming isn't the main culprit. No, economics could spell doom for the western world's chocolate fix.

Farmers in the countries that produce the bulk of cocoa bought by the multinationals who control the market have found the crop a bitter harvest. The minimal rewards they have historically received do not provide incentives for the time-consuming work of replanting as their trees die off – a task that usually means moving to a new area of canopied forest and waiting three to five years for a new crop to mature.

...Despite price rises on the trading floor, precious little reaches the smallholders who make up 95 per cent of growers, according to Mr. Lass, a former Cadburys trader and ethical sourcing advisor who has co-authored a book on the cocoa industry.

"These smallholders earn just 80 cents a day," he says. "So there is no incentive to replant trees when they die off, and to wait up to five years for a new crop, and no younger generation around to do the replanting. The children of these African cocoa farmers, whose life expectancy is only 56, are heading for the cities rather than undertake backbreaking work for such a small reward." As harvests diminish on the Ivory Coast, by far the world's biggest cocoa producer, crops in Indonesia, the third largest producer, have been hit by a change in weather systems, forcing cocoa prices sky-high...

Something MUST BE DONE before it's too late or else...Oh, I don't even want to think about the possibility!