Côte d’Ivoire: Bitter Beans, Sweet Lies—How Your Chocolate Habit Shapes a Nation

Côte d’Ivoire: Where the World’s Cocoa Gets Bitter and the Politics Get Sweeter
By your ex-pat correspondent, still picking chocolate out of his teeth and regrets.

ABIDJAN—If the planet were a badly curated theme park, Côte d’Ivoire would be the gift shop: everybody ends up here eventually, clutching foreign currency and pretending the souvenirs are ethically sourced. The West African state supplies roughly 45 % of the world’s cocoa, which means every guilt-ridden Easter egg and off-brand advent calendar has probably started life as a red-dirt pod in a village you can’t pronounce. Global chocoholics may picture Willy Wonka; locals picture under-funded schools and a president who has perfected the art of winning elections with the same enthusiasm other people reserve for renewing their car insurance.

Alassane Ouattara, the IMF’s former golden boy, recently celebrated a third term that even some of his supporters admit looked suspiciously like a sequel nobody asked for. The constitutional court—think Supreme Court but with fewer press leaks and more family connections—blessed the move, proving once again that term limits are like gym memberships: enthusiastically purchased, rarely enforced. International observers mumbled something about “regrettable irregularities” then sprinted back to their expense-account hotels before happy hour ended. The African Union issued a statement best summarized as “deep concern, shallow follow-up.” The EU threatened to review tariff preferences, which in Brussels-speak is the diplomatic equivalent of unfriending someone on Facebook but still liking their vacation photos.

Meanwhile, the world’s chocolate giants—Nestlé, Mondelez, Hershey, the whole sugary cabal—continue to pledge “a living income” for Ivorian farmers by dates so far in the future they might as well be astrological signs. The going rate for a kilo of cocoa remains less than the price of a venti frappuccino in Manhattan, an irony not lost on farmers who have never seen a frappuccino but intuitively understand the concept of being milked. Multinationals soothe Western consciences with glossy sustainability reports printed on recycled paper, presumably to offset the carbon emitted by executives flying business class to climate conferences. The net result: your conscience is massaged, their margins are protected, and the average Ivorian smallholder still can’t afford malaria meds.

Geopolitically, Côte d’Ivoire has become a sort of Switzerland with humidity—everyone stores their influence here. French troops quietly re-jig their bases under the euphemism “Operation Barkhane lite,” while Chinese engineers pave roads that end abruptly at the next electoral district. Turkish drones patrol the northern border where jihadist spillover from the Sahel threatens to turn the world’s chocolate aisle into a security risk. Washington, distracted by its own slow-motion civics experiment, occasionally parachutes in a deputy assistant undersecretary who photographs cassava fields for Instagram and leaves promising “bilateral engagement,” a phrase that sounds sexy until you realize it’s mostly PowerPoint.

The Ivorian middle class—yes, one exists—navigates this circus with the resigned finesse of a commuter who’s memorized every delay on the metro. They discuss exchange rates over attiéké and complain that Abidjan rents now rival Lisbon, thanks to returning diaspora armed with crypto profits and Scandinavian design sensibilities. Uber has arrived, so traffic jams now come with surge pricing. Even the local startup scene is booming; someone is pitching “CocoaCoin” on a whiteboard in Plateau as we speak, presumably so investors can trade derivatives of derivatives of beans they will never see.

And yet, against the odds, the place works. Ports hum, beer flows, the national football team continues to export prodigies who learn to dribble on dirt pitches and finish their careers in Dubai malls. After two civil wars in twenty years, Ivorians have developed a gallows humor sturdy enough to survive another commodity crash. Ask a taxi driver about politics and he’ll laugh: “We don’t vote for the best candidate, we vote for the one who will steal the least before breakfast.” Parisians nod in recognition.

So when you next bite into a chocolate bar, consider the supply chain: a tree in Africa, a Swiss bank account, a child’s unpaid labor, a marketing intern typing “artisanal” in lowercase. It’s globalization’s most bittersweet love affair—one side addicted to sugar, the other to survival. And somewhere in Abidjan, a bureaucrat stamps another export permit, wondering if the world will ever develop a taste for justice that’s 70 % as strong as its craving for cocoa.