by Carol Off
And there is another factor. Côte d’Ivoire, according to diplomatic sources, is easy to control from the outside. “It never really stopped being a colony,” says one diplomat who studied France’s influence in the country. “No matter what Ivorians tell you, they are still in the thrall of Paris.”
The European Union has tried to penetrate the murky activities in the cocoa filière. The EU began to closely audit the comings and goings of cocoa money in 2002. Kieffer got hold of many of their preliminary reports and circulated the documents widely, while he worked for CCC and after. In those reports, the EU auditors are increasingly frustrated with the lack of transparency and their inability to get access to significant—public—documents. Managers of the filière tell the auditors the internal workings of the cocoa trade are none of their business. The cocoa trade is private enterprise, they say. The language of the audits gets more critical in each edition and finally condemns the Ivorian system in the strongest terms the EU can muster, stopping just short of calling the filière criminal.
The EU reports reveal a shell game in which the money passes through a maze of agencies and gradually disappears and regards the FRC, the group that subsidizes the Fulton chocolate factory, as the worst of the lot, since it has control of the treasury. The money that is supposed to support a base price for the farmers is diverted first of all for war funds and then to the president’s office. The auditors describe a tragic cycle: crushing taxes and fees and arbitrary pricing force farmers to sell their beans illegally in other countries; the government of Côte d’Ivoire recovers the money it is losing in this manner by increasing fees and taxes and by raiding reserve funds that are supposed to improve the lives of farmers and stabilize the prices they get for their product. Farmers increasingly seek their own solutions to escape the exploitation. The resource withers and eventually will die.
The greed of those who are within the circle of political power and influence seems inexhaustible. According to the preliminary investigation by the EU, billions of West African francs are loaned to the president and the defence ministry, loans that are organized by Côte d’Ivoire’s finance department and facilitated by the National Investment Bank. Other unusual money transfers include a payment to the Washington World Group of (a public relations firm whose client list included Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein among many tyrants and despots) to lobby for the Ivorian government in the United States. The FRC would tell the auditors nothing about these endeavours, not even agreeing to explain how the agency managed to start up yet another financial institution without ever registering it. The Agricultural Finance Bank (BFA), appears to be the agency that manages the cocoa and coffee treasuries, though no one is clear on who actually owns it or where the money goes.
The EU targets the cocoa filière and the Ivorian regime, but Kieffer’s reporting went to the heart of the political system. GAK was deeply concerned about the activities of the transnational corporations that had managed to get a stranglehold on the cocoa industry of West Africa. Fifteen foreign corporations control ninety per cent of all the cocoa trade in the country, and a few at the top share a virtual monopoly.
Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are supreme in both cocoa and coffee and, according to documents Kieffer distributed, they are fiercely competitive for domination in the Ivorian cocoa trade. Cargill’s warehouses and cocoa-grinding facilities are prominent throughout Côte d’Ivoire, but nowhere was there a single company representative who would talk to Ange and me. We would make appointments, only to have them cancelled before we arrived. The cocoa industry as a whole is highly competitive and notoriously secretive. Few journalists gain access to its managers.
Based in the farm fields of Minneapolis, Cargill is a massive international corporation and at the same time a family concern, possibly the largest privately owned corporation in the world. Cargill’s influence over the food we eat—where it comes from and how it’s produced—is staggering. Brewster Kneen, a Canadian agribusiness expert, is one of the few people to penetrate the mysterious conglomerate. In his book Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies, Kneen describes a company whose influence over people’s lives is pervasive, but basically unknown. There is hardly a mouthful of food consumed in North America that did not pass through part of its corporate empire.
Cargill has said in the past that its corporate goal is to double in size every five to seven years. Its multi-billion-dollar annual turnover rivals the GDP of all of the poorest sub-Saharan countries put together. Like all transnationals in agriculture, Cargill has helped to persuade countries to abandon food production in favour of export crops, with help from World Bank liberalization schemes that strong-arm developing countries into importing food, principally from transnationals. Cargill’s trade in coffee alone is greater than the aggregate GDP of the countries where it buys the coffee. It’s one of the world’s biggest players in genetically modified foods, and it is fighting strenously to open African farmland to its scientifically produced seed stock.
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the other dominatrix in international agriculture, and is second only to Cargill in Ivorian cocoa trading. ADM is the largest processor of cocoa beans in the world, manufacturing much of the raw material that becomes the brand name chocolate confections we eat. What ADM does best, though, is play politics. This publicly traded company has been one of the largest recipients of corporate welfare in the United States, much of it through personal suasion in the corridors of power. Fortune magazine once called agribusiness “the most manipulated industry on the planet,” and few play the game better than ADM.
In his book Rats in the Grain: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer Daniels Midland, the Supermarket to the World, American author James Lieber describes the extraordinary influence ADM has had: “Probably no one since the trust chieftains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has drawn more on the connection between business and politics or done more to cultivate government officials.” Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, whose Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement profited U.S. corporations such as ADM, sits on the company’s prestigious board of directors. When Senator Tom Harkin (of the Harkin-Engel Protocol) was being sued for libel in the early 1990s, the head of ADM put $10,000 into his defence fund. Harkin is from Iowa, a leading U.S. producer of ethanol, a controversial fuel additive that ADM manufactures. Ethanol kept ADM “drunk on tax dollars” as one think tank expert noted. James Lieber discovered that, by the late 1990s, ADM had become the number one recipient in the United States of all government subsidies to corporations.
While the Washington-based international financial institutions forced Côte d’Ivoire to suspend government subsidies to its agricultural sector and to dismantle its marketing boards, heavily subsidized American corporations were able to move in and take control of the country’s cocoa trade. The monopoly over cocoa and coffee in Côte d’Ivoire means that no indigenous company can get even a toehold in the business. The transnational corporations encourage overproduction of their commodities throughout the world as a way of keeping the price as low as possible and discouraging other players. With so little functioning state machinery in Côte d’Ivoire, and with the small parts that still exist after liberalization under the sway of corrupt leaders, Ivorian companies cannot compete. Credit is essential to create and to run businesses but the giant conglomerates have international guarantees that allow them to borrow at much more competitive rates.
Côte d’Ivoire exports most of its beans raw, since European and U.S. tariffs on processed foods are so much higher than those on raw commodities (tariffs that the “liberalized” countries such as Côte d’Ivoire are not allowed to apply on imports). But even the little bit of cocoa grinding that is done in Côte d’Ivoire, providing manufacturing jobs, is shutting down as the giant cocoa companies monopolize the industry and move it to other countries.
How much of Côte d’Ivoire’s corruption is because of international meddling and transnational monopolies,
and how much is because of the devious activities of the Ivorian elites? A lot of people are on the take in Côte d’Ivoire, though global law and international institutions protect the corporations. The goose that lays the golden egg is being eviscerated by the greedy.
The hotel staff is aghast that a white woman would leave the premises after dark, but just after midnight, I take a taxi to an address in one of Abidjan’s upscale neighbourhoods, where I am to meet with a few members of the Network. I know their names well, since they are in constant contact with each other and I’ve been talking with them, in France and Côte d’Ivoire, for some time. There is no front man anymore, as GAK was, to publicize their research, but that hasn’t deterred them from continuing the work he started.
The members of the Network are black and white, African and European. But these days, all members feel equally threatened in Côte d’Ivoire, especially since so little has been done to find GAK’s killers. The official investigation into Kieffer’s disappearance is painfully slow, and possibly pointless, according to those who follow it closely. “Ramaël wants to know, but France does not,” says one man in reference to the French judge conducting the investigation. Ramaël is good, they all agree, but Côte d’Ivoire is not France, and it’s doubtful he will ever get to the bottom of things.
Kieffer’s friends are very disappointed in Canada as well, believing there was more the Canadian officials could have done to put pressure on the Ivorian government. France carries a lot of baggage as the former colonial power, but Canada has unique abilities in Africa—if its diplomats knew how to use them. (Canadian officials insist they have done all within their power.)
“Guy-André was a fool,” one friend in the Network says abruptly. “He was drugged by his need to know everything. He would go to the bars where the filière hung out. He knew all their names and their addresses.” He hated capitalists, they tell me, which isn’t surprising, given his personal politics. “But most of all,” one friend declares flatly, “he hated the power of money.”
The Network is trying to pick up where Kieffer left off, tracing all the swindles and suspicious deals. A lot of people wonder why they bother. “So what if they can find another person who’s lined his pocket with $10,000!” a foreign businessman said to me one day. “They’re not going to change anything. No one cares. Guy-André Kieffer lost his life for nothing.” But some kind of spell has been cast by Kieffer’s obsession, perhaps not unlike the force field William Nevinson created more than a hundred years earlier. Maybe the cocoa filière will be exposed in Côte d’Ivoire as it was in São Tomé. Of course, then the big international cocoa companies will just move on to other countries, where they will start again.
Yet in this nocturnal conversation with the Network, I feel more and more drawn in to the circle, a reticent member of the secret sect. They pass me documents and feed me names and information, much of which is obscure. A swirl of intrigue envelops us, like the steamy, oppressive tropical air. The Network constantly reminds me about discretion, to be careful what I say and to whom, something Kieffer was incapable of doing.
“But how do I know when I’ve crossed the line?” I ask.
“You crossed it when you came to Côte d’Ivoire.”
Chapter Twelve
BITTERSWEET VICTORY
“I have heard that people may become dependent on us for food … If you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.”
— U.S. SENATOR HUBERT Humphrey, 1957
“Foreign aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.”
— U.S. PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1961
“Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves.”
—U.S. PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON, 1968
LEAVING THE CHAOS OF BELIZE CITY’S AIRPORT, WITH its crush of tourists and ubiquitous billboards for Nestlé products, the tiny fifteen-seat twin-prop plane lifts off into the hazy tropical sunshine and turns south. The verdant jade green jungle clings to the slopes of the Mayan Mountains below, while on the far side of the plane the sparkling aquamarine of the Caribbean vanishes over a distant horizon. The shallow coastal waters of Belize, with the hemisphere’s longest barrier reef, nourish an extraordinary universe of marine life: tropical fish, sea anemones, manatees. A scattering of limestone cayes and tiny islands are today a refuge for fishermen, as they once sheltered the ships of a more predatory breed long ago.
English buccaneers and pirates once hid out in these flashing bays and tropical lagoons, waiting to plunder the Spanish galleons departing the New World, their holds filled to overflowing with wealth stolen by conquistadors from the land and the people they discovered here. With no empire particularly interested in the swampy, forested territory from southern Yucatán to the “Mosquito Coast” of Nicaragua, it eventually became British Honduras. The region has been fully independent, and named Belize, since 1981.
Pirates ruled for years, but gradually British merchants discovered the potential in the area’s natural resources: the logwood tree, used in making dyes for fabrics; mahogany for furniture; sugar; citrus fruit. British colonists moved over from Jamaica and set up thriving business enterprises.
In time, the Baymen, as they came to be known, lost the market for logwood—artificial dyes provided cheap alternatives to the rainforest product—so they pushed further into the interior in search of new sources of wealth, eventually settling the area and becoming the colonial overlords of an English-speaking outpost in a world dominated by Hispanics. National and linguistic differences notwithstanding, English overlords or Spanish, there was one common feature that defined the mercantile adventures in the New World: forced labour.
Africans, not Baymen, did the hard work in the most horrendous conditions imaginable. Much of low-lying Belize’s jungles are insect-infested swamp; the lumber camps where the slaves lived were built on bogs. There was often not enough to eat. Countless thousands of Africans died of hunger and disease. Many committed suicide.
While Africans lost their lives providing mahogany for chairs and tables in Britain, the native Maya of Belize managed to avoid the British slave-drivers. For centuries they had successfully dodged the outsiders or, when confronted, managed to fight them off. Their knowledge of the difficult terrain, and of bush-fighting tactics, served them well, and to this day they remain relatively independent people.
Since the time of Montezuma, this region has yielded some of the best cocoa beans in the Americas. Yet neither the Spanish nor the British seemed particularly interested in developing the potential for cocoa agriculture—lumbering was more lucrative. For hundreds of years, the Maya of Belize cultivated cocoa for trade only among themselves and for their own use. Women still prepare the traditional foaming hot-chili-and-spice cocoa drink that the Olmec passed on to them two thousand years ago, though they now create the bubbly top with the aid of the Spanish-style molinillo and not by pouring the liquid back and forth between jugs. The lush forests still produce a number of wild cocoa trees, just as they did before the conquistadors. But outsiders never seemed to notice the cocoa. Until recently.
After a few brief stops, the plane lands on the tar and gravel patchwork airstrip of Punta Gorda, the largest “city” in the south. It likely took Hernán Cortés many days to pass through these dense jungles when he was chasing his imperial dream, plunging through the alligator swamps and poisonous thickets, overcoming snakes and scorpions, not to mention the resistance of the proud and hostile Maya people, who would bow their heads to no intruder. Now there’s air service and a (mostly) paved highway that extends all the way from Belize City, ending abruptly here, twenty kilometres from the Guatemalan border.
Punta Gorda, or PG, as local people affectionately call the sleepy settlement, is little more than a post office, a pier, a park with a clock tower that st
opped keeping time long ago, a hospital and a smattering of small cafés and hotels for the few tourists who manage to penetrate this far. The tourist beaches and world-famous snorkelling destinations are in northern Belize. Visitors tend to avoid the swampy jungles of the south. The hardy few who come are interested in trekking into the bush to see Mayanculture as it was, or to experience one of the last relatively pristine places on the planet. Many visitors are simply waiting for the next water taxi that will transport them to Guatemala.
Gregor Hargrove is a bit of an anomaly here. He lives and works in Punta Gorda but has no connection to tourism and not much to do with the other foreigners. His office is on the main drag of PG, in an L-shaped concrete building designed simply to keep the sun, wind and rain out. A few small windows and the door are always left open for ventilation, except during hurricane season, but this also means that the noise from the street overwhelms conversations on market days, when people from outlying villages pour in to the town in brightly coloured buses.
Hargrove’s office is a hub of activity: farmers and farm bureaucrats drop in to chat with the man who runs the region’s cocoa trade; peddlers sell him everything from warm buns to fresh fish; children come to ask if Hargrove has any chewing gum (he usually does). The phone rings constantly, but often the calls are from a woman whose husband runs the shop next door, where there is no phone. Behind Hargrove’s makeshift desk are shelves piled with notes and books about agriculture in general and cocoa in particular, the recorded wisdom of regional farming gleaned by foreign agronomists over time. An American Peace Corps volunteer in the office is diligently attempting to record an inventory of all the cocoa farms in what’s known as the Toledo district, the area surrounding Punta Gorda.