by Carol Off
Cocoa wasn’t just an export crop. For its founding father, cocoa was Côte d’Ivoire. The backbone of Houphouët-Boigny’s party was formed by rural cocoa growers and traders. Baoulé tribesmen still dominated the old cocoa-producing areas where Houphouët-Boigny was raised, but outsiders were opening up new frontiers throughout Côte d’Ivoire. In the countryside, a network of mostly Dioula people—Muslims from northern Côte d’Ivoire or the bordering states of Mali and Upper Volta—were the party bosses in each region, appointed by Houphouët-Boigny. While it was resented by some, especially Houphouët-Boigny’s own Baoulé tribesmen, Le Vieux’s patronage of the Dioula was shrewd. They were the most able cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, and they had access to the itinerant labour from their home countries that was so necessary to the success of cocoa production. In addition, the Dioula shared a common religion with Muslim cocoa merchants and middlemen, increasingly French-speaking Arabic business tycoons from Algeria and Lebanon.
Houphouët-Boigny created a fixed price for cocoa beans, giving farmers a guaranteed income even when the market price was low. The state borrowed from European banks to make up the difference. Rural communities had purchasing power for the first time, and Le Vieux’s most loyal and devoted followers were in the countryside. Even if France was still, essentially, running the show and Frenchmen had all the best jobs, this was the best country in Africa for its citizens. There was ample food and virtually no malnutrition.
Côte d’Ivoire was already well on its way to becoming the world’s leading cocoa producer even before fires devastated much of the farming district of Ghana in the 1980s. It now took the lead, following in the steps of Mexico, Venezuela, the Portuguese islands and the Gold Coast. Le Vieux was determined to surrender that number one status to no country.
The great eighteenth-century thinker and writer Alexis de Tocqueville identified a volatile social phenomenon that came to be called the theory of rising expectations. Among its tenets is the idea that improved living conditions sharpen the appetite for more improvements delivered faster. People are rarely satisfied with the pace or the extent of progress. Such was the case with Houphouët-Boigny’s economic miracle. Côte d’Ivoire’s gross national product doubled within a decade of independence, but people wanted more, faster. Even dictatorships require a certain level of satisfaction among the oppressed, and Houphouët-Boigny’s economic success depended on a motivated and contented society. Ivorians had full bellies, but they wanted better lifestyles. They resented the Dioula, who controlled the land in the regions, and they hated the French, who ran the commercial affairs of all their cities.
Houphouët-Boigny’s miracle was already something of a mirage. He was subsidizing the price of cocoa beans and attempting to win the hearts and minds of his citizens with massive public works projects, many of them laudable, some laughable, but all of them built with borrowed money. New roads, bridges and telecommunications systems made a modern state out of a colonial backwater. A small coastal fishing village—a swamp, really—called San Pedro was transformed when Houphouët-Boigny decided to turn it into one of the largest, deepest ports on the West African coast, almost exclusively for the purpose of shipping cocoa to the world. Before-and-after photos are astonishing: construction workers completely remade the coastal landscape, building a bustling commercial centre from a cluster of mud huts. Transport ships from Holland, France and America soon lined the harbour, ready to carry away millions of tons of beans to chocolate lovers everywhere. But the cost of the port created massive public debt.
Among Houphouët-Boigny’s wackier projects was the Hôtel Ivoire. Built in the principal Ivorian city of Abidjan, the hotel became one of the ritziest operations in post-colonial Africa, a miniature city on the side of a lagoon. The hotel’s casino and multiple restaurants, swimming pools and shopping plazas were for the exclusive use of Europeans (lest Ivorians became corrupted). There was even a patinoire, which Houphouët-Boigny boasted was Africa’s only ice-skating rink. But the cost of keeping the ice frozen in a place where the temperature rarely dips below thirty degrees centigrade, and where the humidity is often eighty per cent, seemed the height of folly.
Abidjan itself became one of the most remarkable cities in the developing world, with bold modern buildings poking the African sky with their asymmetrical shapes and guzzling electricity to keep the hermetically sealed offices cool. The price of cocoa on the international market was on a constant roller coaster ride—all too often on the downslide—but it was the government, not the farmers, who absorbed the losses. Côte d’Ivoire was deeply in debt long before Houphouët-Boigny began to build his final monument to himself, the basilica.
As cocoa and coffee prices nosedived in the late 1980s, Houphouët-Boigny was desperate to increase the value of his beans. Because Côte d’Ivoire was the biggest single cocoa exporter in the world, Le Vieux was deluded, as others had been before him, into thinking he actually had power in the marketplace. The world of commodities had changed drastically in a few decades, and a small country could exert very little influence on markets. World market prices were determined by commodities brokers who never saw a bean in their entire lives, along with a few powerful multinational corporations who had their own tactically managed stockpiles.
Houphouët-Boigny tried his best to manipulate the international cocoa trade but commodities investors and big cocoa companies seemed to have all the influence over the market. Finally, in 1987, the African miracle maker made his most desperate bid yet to save what was left of his country’s wealth. He declared Côte d’Ivoire insolvent, unable to pay its massive debts—now totalling US$4.5 billion—and reneged on his debt repayment schedule. At the same time, Houphouët-Boigny blocked all shipments of his cocoa to international markets, a boycott he managed to sustain for two years. He literally shut down the economy of his country, and its government offices ceased to function. As documented in a bestselling book published in France in the 1980s, La guerre du cacao: Histoire secrète d’un embargo, the president launched a virtual cocoa war: Le Vieux against the giant multinational chocolate companies and the banks. In his final salvo, the president secretly secured a large grant from his former colonial masters in Paris in exchange for contracts awarding all of Côte d’Ivoire’s beans to two giant French companies. It was high-stakes poker played with some of the most skilled gamblers on the planet.
It was the French media that exposed the secret arrangement, and the deal subsequently collapsed. With only one commodity propping up his entire economic miracle, Houphouët-Boigny’s wager bankrupted the country even further. Farmers weren’t paid, prices soared, local businesses withered. It was a total failure for Houphouët-Boigny and a complete victory for multinational cocoa companies, who had proven that even the biggest cocoa-producing country in the world couldn’t push them around. What’s more, the banks moved in on Le Vieux to make sure there would be no more reneging on payments. They had a new weapon to use on difficult countries such as Côte d’Ivoire.
It is generally accepted that the Bretton Woods delegates in July 1944 honestly intended the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become benevolent forces in the post-war universe. It was a time of high optimism, an opportunity for men of vision and determination to create structures that would prevent a recurrence of the political and economic chaos of the preceding decades. Today, after more than a half-century of experience, benevolence is not a word that springs easily to the lips of clients of these two international financial institutions. Bullying and manipulative policies in the developing world have left a wake of disillusionment and bitterness, along with real economic hardship. The currents of anger run particularly deep in Côte d’Ivoire.
By the late 1980s, the World Bank and the IMF had evolved into the most powerful international institutions in history as they increasingly came under the sway of neo-liberal American monetary and foreign policy, devised in Washington D.C. and, often derisively, labelled “the Washington consensus.” Driven largely
by the ideological vision of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his economic advisors, and that of his political soulmate, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the two institutions became instruments of a hard-line movement to impose rigid capitalist and monetarist policies on floundering Third-World economies—of which there were many, thanks to the mismanagement and corruption of autocratic indigenous leadership.
That the fiscal policies and economic programs imposed on client states were generally more beneficial to banks, treasuries and corporate officers of the developed world only deepened an already widespread cynicism in the struggling nations of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The IMF, and in particular the World Bank, whose leaders are chosen by Washington, were soon regarded as the henchmen of Reaganomics ideology. Liberalization was the buzzword of the day, driving the demand for an end to marketing boards, domestic regulatory agencies, protective tariffs, subsidies and any program that might compromise the “natural” dynamic of the global marketplace.
Developing countries whose leaders had attempted to stave off ruin by accumulating massive debts—which often served to cover up their own greed—now turned to the World Bank for salvation. Côte d’Ivoire had become one of the most indebted countries in the world, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny lined up with the others for financial assistance.
The World Bank and the IMF had only one prescription for all the debtor nations that showed up in their waiting rooms: the shock therapy of liberalization. The bankrupted countries would have to dismantle their agricultural boards, cease to provide any subsidies to industry and desist from anything but the most nominal role in their own economic affairs. The directives insisted that all government programs be slashed or eliminated; that civil service be cut to the bone; and that health care, education and public infrastructure be reduced to a minimum. People were told to expect to pay user fees even to see a doctor. Currencies had to be devalued. Debtor nations found themselves growing crops for export while importing most of their food (mainly from the U.S.). State enterprises were privatized and sold (usually to foreign multinational corporations), and commodities floated on the open market, where they would usually sell for the lowest price possible. These were called Structural Adjustment Programs—SAPs—an acronym that perfectly described what SAPs do to the lifeblood of suffering societies.
Houphouët-Boigny took his medicine—or, rather, his citizens did. Côte d’Ivoire turned itself over to the two institutions in 1989, just as the basilica reached completion, taking six World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans over the next five years and attempting to absorb the excruciating pain of the SAPs. The World Bank zeroed in on agriculture, and in particular the cocoa industry. Houphouët-Boigny had established an agency called CAISTAB—Le Caisse de Stabilization—to guarantee a base price for cacao farmers no matter what the unpredictable commodities markets were doing. Under the shock therapy of liberalization, CAISTAB had to go.
Farmers, many of whom were uneducated, with no access to stock market figures, found themselves stranded, tossed rudderless onto the sea of Reaganomics liberalism. The cocoa market became a free-for-all, and the farmers, without CAISTAB’s subsidies, started to lose large amounts of money. Small-business loans had been available in the past, but under the SAPs these no longer existed. The purchasing power of the producers and the small businesses they depended on began to collapse as the Côte d’Ivoire currency lost value on the foreign exchange markets. And to top it all off, the international market price for cocoa beans dipped to its lowest in decades.
None of this had any effect on the chocolate companies and multinational food exporters—quite the contrary. The prices were low, and farmers were increasing their yields in a desperate attempt to generate more income. Cocoa exports from Côte d’Ivoire increased as the price sank. At the same time, more countries, mostly in Asia, were now producing cocoa with the encouragement of the World Bank and the IMF, flooding the market with beans and driving down prices even further.
Liberalization triumphed all through the 1980s and ’90s, while cocoa values rode the market roller coaster with little regard for economic reality. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) listed cocoa among the most volatile and unpredictable commodities in the world. It declared, in one of its otherwise cautious reviews, that the ideology of liberalization was the direct cause of the freefall in the price of cocoa.
Commodities exchanges in London and New York became the custodians of the lives of Ivorian cocoa producers thousands of miles away. Speculators played the hedge market, guessing what price cocoa beans might fetch in the future and basing their predictions on myriad factors such as weather, disease and pestilence, world stock supplies and war. A rumour of a possible coup d’état could send prices soaring, while wild speculation about a bumper crop could push prices in the other direction. By purchasing futures, a company with accurate information can lock down prices that turn into bonanzas when predictable circumstances come to pass. But only people with money to spare can play these odds. And when the commodity is as vulnerable to caprice as cocoa, competent speculators can—and do—make a lot of money quickly.
Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, Côte d’Ivoire lost its miracle. Multinational corporations took control of the industry through the leverage of SAPs, and by the end of the 1990s a small handful of foreign firms controlled almost all of Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa production. The Belgian and Swiss giants Barry Callebaut and Nestlé and the American food conglomerates Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland cornered world markets, becoming suppliers to the European and U.S. manufacturers that had run the business since the previous century.
Félix Houphouët-Boigny continued to lose strength over the two and a half decades of his presidency. Near the end, he belatedly offered his people some elements of democracy, including open elections to assuage their other woes. But with the jobless rate soaring, along with inflation, a free vote was little comfort. As an octogenarian, he retreated to his artificial capital and his Vatican in the jungle. He passed away in 1993, just a few years after Pope John Paul II consecrated Our Lady of Peace Basilica. Houphouët-Boigny wouldn’t see Côte d’Ivoire descend into war and chaos, nor would he know that his precious cocoa sector would fall victim to some of the most corrupt and criminal exploitation in Africa.
By the end of the millennium, Côte d’Ivoire was one of the most indebted nations on earth, even as it supplied almost half of the world’s cocoa to the multi-billion-dollar industry and helped to satisfy the world’s addiction to chocolate. Cocoa farmers slid deeper and deeper into poverty, and they began to look for cheaper ways to produce their beans. They turned to the same old scourge that has plagued cocoa growing since its inception—slavery.
Chapter Six
THE DISPOSABLES
“In the old days slaves were expensive; you kept them for their whole lives, you took care of them. Today they are cheap; there is a glut of slaves and when you’ve used them you throw them away if you don’t want them any more—they’re disposable.”
—KEVIN BALES, Free the Slaves
ABDOULAYE MACKO SETTLES HIS LARGE FRAME INTO an armchair at the Grand Hotel in Mali’s capital city of Bamako and looks about to see if he knows anyone in the lobby. His caftan robes are fraying, and his once elegant white shoes are worn through in several places. He has the appearance and demeanour one would expect from an out-of-work diplomat in the Republic of Mali who is trying to keep his place in society. It has been five years since he had to suspend what came to be his driving mission in life: liberating conscripted child workers from the cocoa farms of Côte d’Ivoire.
Macko orders a plate of buttery croissants and a big bowl of café au lait, consumes everything with zeal and orders more. I was warned by a local aid worker who knows Macko that he is a freeloader and would probably ask me for money. But aside from the obvious fact that he’s famished—he had left at dawn and travelled two hours on public transportation to keep our appointment—the unem
ployed civil servant seems to want little more than a patient listener for a long and disturbing story. And I am more than willing to oblige.
Macko had been the Malian consul general in Bouaké, in central Côte d’Ivoire, until his government recalled him in 2000. He never really learned why he was withdrawn and then “retired,” but he can guess that it was because, in the eyes of his political masters, he had caused too much trouble. I had confirmed this much prior to our conversation.
Macko is a classic whistle-blower. In the late 1990s, he began to hear stories that disturbed him greatly. Bouaké is in the heart of the cocoa-producing sector of Côte d’Ivoire, where thousands of Malians—tens of thousands at peak season—live and work on the farms. In addition to the large numbers of people who came to Côte d’Ivoire from Mali and other poor West African countries under the benevolent eye of Félix Houphouët-Boigny and who have farmed their own plots of land for as many as four decades, a small army of Malian men and older boys descend into the fertile cocoa belt each season to earn extra money as hired labourers. It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement for decades.
But Macko learned of another category of labour that he couldn’t quite fathom. What his informers described sounded a lot like slavery, and what made the stories even more horrifying was that it seemed the slaves were children. Surely it wasn’t possible! Slavery and all the euphemisms for it—bonded labour, conscript, coolie—had, supposedly, ended long ago. There had been laws against that type of thing for years.