Why we can't buy Ghanaian chocolate bars

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I was quite struck by this article about a woman making artisan chocolate in Ghana:

Ruth had come over to meet potential trade buyers and told me her story. Chocolate was for her currently a cottage industry, using her garage as a factory and employing her mother to grind beans obtained from a nearby farm. To my mind, it was a chocolate equivalent to a micro-brewery, converting local crops for local consumption. Surprisingly, she is the first independent business to make artisan chocolate in Ghana.

It's a reminder - as the writer makes clear - that Africa is a very different place from the myth presented by NGOs like Oxfam or Save the Children with their images of starving children, subsistence agriculture and wicked foreign investors. Instead, we've a glimpse of an increasingly urban society filled with enterprising people like Ruth. It also tells us that the traditional source of funding - the bank loan - can be difficult for traders like Ruth to secure.

But before we get to tied up in feeling sorry for Ruth and her mum, let's remember she has the resources to travel to London to pitch to trade buyers at an exhibition promoting hundreds of Ghanaian businesses to buyers in the UK. The writer suggests - because he's from a cuddly social enterprise background - the sort of crowd-funding approach to financing Ruth's business that Hotel Chocolat and Brewdog has used. Make an offer - whether it's a cash return or free chocolate doesn't really matter - to potential small investors.

And it struck me that, regardless of the way in which investors are rewarded for their investment, this is a very good way of financing a business - the business-owner transfers the risk to the investor. And it's true that crowdfunding can be an effective means for many initiatives - Bradford's Drunken Film Festival for example - but wouldn't a better route for nascent small businesses like Ruth's being the issue and sale of share capital? Either through 'Dragon's Den' style angel investors or other routes to equity markets.

The other problem for a Ghanaian chocolate business is, of course, the way in which the developed world protects its chocolate business:

Cocoa producing countries limit themselves to mainly exporting beans -rather than manufactured cocoa, or chocolate products- mostly because of tariff escalation. The EU has a bound rate of 0 percent for cocoa beans, but a 7.7 percent, and 15 percent ad valorem duty on cocoa powder and chocolate crumb containing cocoa butter respectively;
Similarly, Japan applies a bound rate of 0 percent for un-processed cocoa beans, but charges a 10 percent tax for cocoa paste wholly or partly defatted, and a 29.8 percent duty on cocoa powder containing added sugar;
The US has no ad valorem on cocoa beans, but imposes a duty of 0.52 cents/Kg for cocoa powder -with no added sugar- and tariffs could go up to 52.8 cents/Kg for imported chocolate products containing cocoa butter.

Maybe that's for another day but it's a reminder that, for all our heart-on-sleeve keening about Africa, we consistently make it more difficult for businesses from places like Ghana to do business - other than on our strict and expensive terms - here in the developed world. To start with Ruth will get some protection if she focuses on small consignments but the tariffs will kick in the minute she's exporting for resale rather than individual consumption.


The best thing - other than investing - the the developed world can do is stop placing barriers between producers and manufacturers in places like Africa and the markets they needs to succeed in Europe, North America and Japan.

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Friday Fungus: It had to happen! Welcome to mushroom chocolate!

I am grateful to Julia for bringing this to my attention:

Our aim has always been to develop high quality medicinal mushroom products that improve your health and wellbeing. Not only that, but we want to make it a tasty experience too. That's why our chocolates are the perfect excuse to enjoy raw chocolate whilst getting all the healing benefits of mushrooms. 

The full chocolate range - seven flavours is available at Harrods. Where else!

The firm in question is Hifas da Terra who are a splendidly batty (but super-scientific) Spanish company:

The Hifas da Terra project comes from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC ) where Catalina Fernández de Ana Portela, biologist and founder of the company, began to develop an initiative to grow saprophytic fungi on wood logs. After several years of business coaching and scientific studies at the forestry reasearch center ”Lourizán”, Hifas da Terra was created in 1999. A biotechnology company focused on mycology, trying to bring the knowledge of the beneficial properties of mushrooms to the people.

The firm retails mushroom kits, creams, soaps and health spa treatments, assorted gourmet products (including mushrooms in honey - not to be confused with honey mushrooms), food supplements and gifts, including a range of stylish clutch bags:

Brilliant!

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Welcome to Midwich - New Puritans, schools and the brainwashing of children

The New Puritan agenda is at its most insistent in schools:

Mr Ayers also spoke out after his son had a fun-size pack of Maltesers confiscated by teachers after it was spotted in his lunch box.

My Ayers said: 'I put the Maltesers in as a weekly treat, but the school confiscated them for some reason.

'The school should be concentrating on other things rather than banning children playing games and taking their chocolate away.'

It is for the children, we're told. Not only is 'obesity' a worry but play must be purposeful - directed to the agenda of creating supine, dependent and content children. Any hint of assertiveness, any exploration of violence, and the authorities step in - only they have the power (but it is exercised oh so benignly):

Headteacher Karen Jaeggi defended the policy this week, saying: 'We actively discourage children from playing violent games or games involving imaginary weapons in the playground by explaining to them what it represents.

'Some children can be easily frightened by violent play which is often influenced by computer games and we feel that such games can have a harmful effect on young minds.'

You see what's happening here? Children are being told that only certain type of play are acceptable - making a gun with your fingers and say "pyoinng, pyoingg...you're dead" isn't approved.

The most worrying thing about this is the absolute certainty of the head teacher. She is sure in her belief, her faith in the new puritan message. Parents putting a pack of fun sized Maltesers in a lunch box is the root cause of obesity - leave aside that the contents of a child's lunchbox is nothing at all to do with the school. And gangs, murder and general badness comes as a result of kids playing cops and robbers - egged on by the manipulative and shady exploiters of the computer games business.

What we don't see - these extreme events give us a glimpse behind the curtain - is the every day brain washing of children in the New Puritan agenda. Whether it's misinforming them about recycling, promoting the distortion of 'fair trade' or implicit criticism of parents for drinking, smoking or eating foods that aren't approved. And all of this is wrapped up in pseudo-science and an unquestioning acceptance of whatever the New Puritan priests tell the teachers.

Welcome to Midwich.


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Easter - a thought, maybe a blessing

 

We celebrate Easter - the festival of Christ's resurrection. The wonder of that revelation inspires great good and sets us on a path of truth. But is this the only truth? After all the word, Easter, dates from before Christ's death and rising:

The name "Easter" originated with the names of an ancient Goddess and God. The Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE.) a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Similarly, the "Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos."  Her name was derived from the ancient word for spring: "eastre." Similar Goddesses were known by other names in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime. 

 The goddess of the dawn would be a spirit of fertility - a celebration of the fresh day in the same way that a goddess of spring would welcome the new life this season brings. Which I guess brings us to the rabbits - yet not in celebration of their proverbial fecundity but, it seems, in confusion with their relation, the hare:

In his late 19th century study of the Hare in folk custom and mythology, Charles J. Billson cites numerous incidents of folk custom involving the hare around the period of Easter in Northern Europe. Billson says that “whether there was a goddess named Eostre, or not, and whatever connection the hare may have had with the ritual of Saxon or British worship, there are good grounds for believing that the sacredness of this animal reaches back into an age still more remote, where it is probably a very important part of the great Spring Festival of the prehistoric inhabitants of this island.”

So what is it about hares that brought about such reverence during the onset of Spring? Was it their memorable courtship - we forget that hares boxing is the girl checking out the boy not two boys scrapping over the female:

 Hare were - in their mad march way - a great symbol of the explosion of life that occurred each Spring. The active, excitable, aggressive life matched with that other great Easter symbol the egg.

So what of Easter - are you like me witnessing a new summer emerging fresh, scrubbed and new from the dark ground? Are you looking to your family and using the time to eat, drink and make merry with them? This is the message of Easter for me - the joy of new life and the salvation that new life brings. A time to reflect on growth, goodness and the wellspring of ideas.

Above all, Easter, like all our festivals represents a time when the magic of nature comes a little closer. We hesitate to touch that magic, we wrap it up in silver foil, make it from chocolate and surround it with marzipan balls. But it is still there - a spirit of newness, a breath of joyous exuberance in Spring.

I like to think that is why those hares dance - at the joy of Spring.

Happy Easter!

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Ox-tail stew - with and without chocolate

First catch your ox....

...or else bob down to a good butcher and buy an oxtail (get that butcher to chop it up and remove any obvious lumps of fat).

To complete the stew you'll need:

Couple of onions
A leek
Teaspoonful each of Cumin, black onion seeds & caraway seeds
Salt
Bottle of white wine
2 cans of tomatoes
Some kind of fat or oil

(I'll get to the chocolate bit later)

Heat the oil or fat in a heavy casserole dish and sear the pieces of oxtail. Add the chopped onions and leeks plus the spices and salt. Cook for a few minutes until soft then cover with the white wine (you'll need the whole bottle I'm afraid). Bring to the boil and then turn down to a low heat and simmer uncovered until the wine has almost boiled away.

Add the tomatoes, bring back to the boil, cover and then transfer to a warm oven (c150 degrees). Cook for ages and ages (today's stew had 5 hours). Remove from the oven - I usually boil away some of the sauce to make it thicker and gloopier. Serve with big chunks of wholemeal bread, jacket spuds or mash.

The chocolate bit: for an interesting tweak stir in half a teaspoonful of cocoa powder before putting it in the over for the marathon 5 hour session. Don't be tempted to put more in as that small amount will give a great chocolaty aftertaste to the stew - any more and it'll be like dropping a bar of CDM in just chocolate and no stew!