Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  Hargrove seems familiar to a visitor from Canada. There’s something in his demeanour and his accent—something decidedly Maritime-Canadian. And sure enough, he reveals that he hails from the Saint John River area of New Brunswick. Then there’s the question of his name: one that’s familiar to Canadians who follow the affairs of the Canadian Auto Workers Union and its high-profile president, Buzz Hargrove. Gregor is Buzz’s cousin. The name and the birthplace might suggest a disposition towards social activism and Gregor Hargrove doesn’t disagree, but he has a clear-eyed view of the potential for social development in a well-run business.

  “I watched the area where I grew up go from poor to prosperity because of the McCains,” Hargrove says. The McCains are a powerful East Coast family that is often criticized for its economic dominance in New Brunswick’s agriculture and for a chemically dependant potato monoculture in the northwest of the province. But Hargrove argues that the province of his birth has done well by the McCains. They never tried to own the land but just to buy its bounty from the farmers. They processed the produce in the region, transforming millions of tons of potatoes into precut frozen french fries right next to the fields from which they came. “It’s better to manufacture than to export raw goods,” Hargrove explains. “We shipped out coal, we shipped out logs, we shipped out unprocessed fish, we shipped out people,” he says of the Maritimes. But not the spuds. The McCains’ approach to business, he says, allowed people to stay on their land and share in the prosperity.

  Hargrove ran his own successful timber business in New Brunswick. The work was hard. His wife died of cancer when his children were young, and he struggled with the burdens of single parenthood. He promised himself that once he’d weathered all the storms, fulfilled his responsibilities, he would leave—find something meaningful to do with the rest of his life. Time passed, his children grew, and life settled down and, in fact, became quite dull. One day he saw a job posting on a bulletin boardfrom CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas), offering work in Belize to mature people with business expertise. It sounded like the opportunity he’d dreamed of: a chance to make a difference in the world.

  “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Hargrove says of the day he arrived in Belize. He was paid only a pittance, but it was enough for food and a car. When that job ended, he went to work on a UNESCO contract studying the barrier reef. Then there was a stint with the Audubon Society, examining the tourist potential of bird sanctuaries. In 2001, Hargrove’s work sent him to the outback of Belize, where he met the elusive natives of the region. He spent a lot of time in the remote and relatively undeveloped Toledo district around Punta Gorda, where the majority of people are Mayan farmers. One topic dominated conversation. “All the people were talking about was cocoa and the cocoa market,” says Hargrove. He knew nothing about the industry or the long Mayan history with the beans, but he was intrigued by what they were saying. The farmers were convinced there was a ready and growing market for whatever amount of cocoa they could grow. But they were nervous about investing any further. The Toledo farmers had been burned before.

  In the early 1990s, Mayan farmers in the region had started to grow premium cocoa for a British company called Green & Black’s. The company, however, was getting more than a bit frustrated with what they perceived as a lack of business acumen on the part of the Belizeans. The Toledo growers were coping with too many problems, not least of which was a lack of organization. They had a fledgling co-operative, the Toledo Cacao Growers Association (TCGA), to represent them in their dealings with the outside world, but it was no match for the dealers in the volatile cocoa industry.

  Hargrove realized that, if the farmers didn’t get some real help, they would probably lose the contract they had signed with Green & Black’s. He had been planning to move on from Belize after the Audubon job, but there was something about the Maya that reminded him of the people he had grown up with back home in the Maritimes. The communities were tightly knit and reluctant to challenge accepted wisdom. “Mayan families are very large,” observes Hargrove, who was the oldest of eleven children. “Well, they’re no bigger than at home, but the connections are like the Saint John River Valley and how Cape Breton used to be. And whether you believe what your extended family member is saying or not, they’re your family.” The farmers needed to take control of their affairs, and they needed a hard-nosed business type with knowledge of how things are done in the “white” world. Hargrove took over the management of TCGA.

  The Toledo farmers were mostly Maya from the tribes of Mopan and Kekchi, descendants of the clans that the Dominican friars of the sixteenth century had sent back to Spain along with the first samples of cacahuatl to show Prince Philip. Bartolomé de Las Casas had found the Kekchi difficult four hundred years ago, and Hargrove found them no less obstreperous when he started working with them in 2003. Some of the farmers welcomed him, but he also made enemies as he began to fire incompetents and hire people he thought might regard the organization as a business and not a social club. It was a harsh blow, coming from a foreigner who had never seen a cocoa tree before he arrived in Belize.

  In the backwoods of Toledo, progress is spotty. The road to San Pedro Columbia, at the foot of the Mayan Mountains, is a potholed lane that meanders through many villages. Houses are built of thatch and wood and occasionally the more expensive stucco. Some have electricity; others are lit by lamps. Most evening activity is around the small cookhouses, where wives and daughters prepare meals of rice and beans, much as they have since before the conquistadors came.

  Cocoa is still a large part of the Mayan culture in the villages, and people cultivate some of it for their own consumption. When the beans are harvested, the children suck the sweet pulp when they get a chance, while men stroll around with pockets full of dried beans, shelling and eating them like peanuts. Armando Choco, an administrator of the TGCA, still looks forward to the chili-spiked chocolate drink his mother prepares for the family once a week. A native woman hauls out a bar of solid chocolate from Guatemala. She drops pieces of the hard confection into boiling water to make a drink, just as Cortés had seen women like her do centuries ago. But the little general store in San Miguel also sells Kit Kats, Nestlé’s Crunch and Mr. Big, while the Punta Gorda supermarket is awash with foreign cocoa products, including Hershey’s. If you want cocoa prepared the ancient Mayan way, you have to make it yourself.

  At the first annual meeting of the TCGA after Hargrove took over, nearly five times as many farmers turned out as were in attendance at previous gatherings. “We had 350 people,” recalls Hargrove. “They were in the streets and everywhere. It was a hard meeting, and they were asking hard questions.”

  Nothing was going to happen unless everybody pulled together, he told them, with Justino Peck, a local farmer and chairman of the TCGA board, at his side. The office would be open every day, unlike in the past, when most of the time there was no one running the shop. All transactions would be done fairly. Nobody would work for nothing, Hargrove promised. “So we opened her up and kept it going, and they started coming in. It just kept growing.”

  Hostility towards outsiders runs deep, originating with the Maya’s first contact with Europeans centuries ago. From marauding conquistadors to British merchants, their memories are of exploitation and abuse that moderated only slightly after the British outlawed slavery in the 1830s.

  Belize turned to American markets for its trade relationships and, by the 1950s, the entire region was a patchwork of mostly U.S. transnational businesses stitched on the tattered blanket of colonialism. As was the case in Africa, the national borders in Central America were arbitrary, configured by the needs of empires, with little bearing on historical and tribal realities. The term “banana republic,” coined for neighbouring Honduras, came into general usage in the region.

  Following years of logging as the prime industry, agriculture finally emerged as an important source of exports for Belize: citrus fruit, bananas, sugar and, slowly but surely,
cocoa. In the 1970s, U.S. food companies moved in to exploit the British colony’s resources. One of them was the Hershey Chocolate Company of Pennsylvania.

  American chocolate-makers, who had been importing cocoa beans from Ghana, wanted supplies of cocoa closer to home, in countries under the direct sway of American foreign policy, principally those subjected to the regional hegemony of the Monroe doctrine. Hershey’s managers inherited their founder’s obsession with having secure sources of raw material, and they began to look seriously at the original source of Theobroma, the area south of the Yucatán Peninsula. Streets in Hershey, Pennsylvania, bear the names of old-time cocoa-producing regions: Aruba, Caracas and Granada—locations where much of the cocoa production had been struck down by overproduction and disease. If Hershey could develop a hybrid tree that was impervious to witches’ broom, capsid and pod rot, then it would not only guarantee supply but also gain an important advantage in a growing field of competitors.

  Belize excited American corporations such as Hershey for many reasons: it was near the United States; it was underpopulated and undeveloped; there was virgin land and good soil; people spoke English; the natives were docile; and Belize was politically stable, unlike the dictatorships of the other countries in Central America. Cocoa production in Belize was small, limited to local production. It was wide open for corporations that wanted to build on the homegrown operations. The Belizean government allowed for a hundred per cent foreign ownership of any business enterprise in the country, and offered an exemption from import duties and extended tax holidays. It was exactly the sort of place the Hershey Chocolate Company was looking for.

  Hummingbird Hershey Limited became a Belize-based enterprise dedicated to developing hybrid cocoa trees and providing them to the farms of producers interested in growing for Hershey. The tree nursery and plantation soon stretched for hundreds of acres along the Sibun River, near the principal artery, the Hummingbird Highway. Hershey would not only produce cocoa from the hybrid stock but also conduct research and train local producers.

  One might have expected that Mayan farmers who had cultivated Theobroma for thousands of years would know a thing or two about growing cocoa. But Hershey was not interested in the slowpoke farming methods of yore. The old-fashioned Criollo tree stock that grew naturally would be dug up in favour of cultivars that would yield many times as many beans as the native species. Hummingbird specialists said they could plant the new trees close together in order to increase productivity per acre. The scientists told the farmers that the horticultural assumption that cocoa trees needed shade was not entirely true. Theobroma could actually grow in full sun, without a canopy of other trees, although such growing conditions were possible only with much larger amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Industrial farming of this nature and scale would cost money, of course, but loans would be provided.

  The 1970s saw some of the highest prices for cocoa beans in the history of the international market, up to US$5,300 per ton, and the Belizean government was anxious to get its share of the pie. Of course, there was the problem of land ownership—Mayan Indians had reservations and had never owned their own property—but over time the government could resolve that. The important thing was to take advantage of this opportunity that Hershey was offering. Given the spike in cocoa prices, the farmers had few qualms about the Hummingbird Cocoa project, and many of them soon became involved.

  The Maya of Toledo, in particular, wanted a piece of the action. To circumvent land ownership issues, they came together as a collective—the TCGA. The farmers were shocked, a few years after they planted their trees in the early 1980s, when the price for cocoa tumbled to a low of $1,530 a ton. But the World Bank issued an influential report in 1986 anticipating that cocoa prices would soon reverse the downward trend. The farmers of Toledo had no idea that Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s Ivorian miracle was at this point falling apart as the international market flooded with cocoa, much to the delight of the transnationals. All the industry players reassured the farmers that this was a small black spot on an otherwise rosy outlook.

  Part of the optimism came from the knowledge that U.S. government policies and programs were offering influential incentives for Belizean cocoa. A driving force behind cocoa production in Belize was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an important tool of U.S. foreign policy. For all the material benefits available to needy clients, USAID has never been in doubt about its priorities, unsubtly described in 1961 by John F. Kennedy as being to “advance the political and economic interests of the United States.”

  The USAID bureaucracy has also had controversial links to the Central Intelligence Agency and, though regularly denied, a history of links to subterfuge in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, in Central America during unrest in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and in Afghanistan during the occupation by the Soviet Union. Whatever else it might be, USAID is an instrument of political and economic influence wherever U.S. interests lie.

  In the late 1980s, USAID and the conservative Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), a sub-agency of USAID, joined forces with Hershey and the Belizean Department of Agriculture to launch the Accelerated Cocoa Project, a program to push more farmers into hybrid tree production faster. Documents and transcripts from an extensive three-day conference in Belize in 1988 reveal the degree to which the big players were sugar-coating the commercial possibilities in the cocoa industry. The event was billed as the first Belize National Cocoa Forum, and it was convened in the capital, Belmopan, to discuss “the problems and opportunities” in the cocoa industry. All the players were there: Hershey; the foreign aid agencies (the event was funded by USAID); the government, including the prime minister; and the farmers. Given the promises and commitments offered at the forum, the Toledo Cacao Growers, who were present, must have come away feeling quite hopeful.

  The highlight of the event was an apparent corporate and government commitment to Belizean farmers. The record shows that, throughout the conference, Hummingbird Hershey made it clear it would purchase “all cocoa produced in Belize” and would pay $1.70 a pound for properly fermented and dried beans. Attempts to secure a commitment from Hershey that this was a guaranteed price were brushed aside. The company promised it would always pay the market price for all the beans and since worldwide demand for cocoa was increasing and Hershey’s demand for cocoa was not about to decrease, there was nothing to worry about. At least, not in the sunny atmosphere of the cocoa forum.

  The Belizean minister of agriculture took the podium at one point to reassure farmers that, while prices for cocoa may have been in a slump at the time, there was “no need for despair.” With Hershey’s guarantee, and the quality of Belizean cocoa, what could go wrong? The only hope for success for the time being, said the minister, was to change local farming practices and implement the accelerated cocoa project Hershey and its financial backers recommended. The farmers “must plant the improved hybrid varieties and apply the recommended cultural practices,” he told them. Father knows best.

  A Belizean government representative eventually took the stage to announce the most tantalizing tid-bit: Belize was negotiating a US$20 million loan with the World Bank in order to transform the rainforests of the country into productive cocoa farms. With two of the most influential agencies in the world onside and convinced of the wisdom of the cocoa project, no Toledo farmer was in a position to argue.

  Of course, the dream could be realized only if the farmers did their part, and that meant they would have to borrow—a lot. The Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a Belizean government agency that provides credit to entrepreneurs, was standing by to provide the financing but only under certain conditions: every farmer would have to spend at least three days at Hummingbird Hershey being trained in the new farming methods; the farmers would have to offer their land and all their assets as collateral for loans; they would have to use the new hybrid stock, with its dependence on expensive chemicals (for the purchase o
f which they could borrow more money); and they would have to use crop husbandry policies that the international agencies recommended.

  The problem for the Toledo Maya was that they had no collateral for loans because they didn’t own their land as individuals. So the lending agencies provided “crop loans,” using other commodities from their collective farming operations, such as rice, as security, and they encouraged the Maya to acquire additional land outside their reserves so they would have new collateral for their loans (even though the farmers would have to borrow in order to buy this land). Interest rates were twelve per cent, a staggering figure for a government lending agency that was promoting economic development. But, according to the DFC, it was consistent with international lending rates.

  For the accelerated cocoa production, the farmers would require chemicals such as the herbicide paraquat—dubbed by environmentalists as one of the “dirty dozen” of toxic agrochemicals—and U.S.–produced Roundup. Conference delegates questioned the environmental consequences of these advanced farming methods. One delegate, Erasmo Franklin, provided one of the few dissenting voices when he blurted out: “The Hummingbird landscape is being raped … the waterways are being polluted by pesticide and nitrates (fertilizers). It ends up being a risk/benefit thing. Do we die of hunger or put nitrites in our water?”

  There was no answer.

  Gordon Patterson, listed in the program as a Hershey scientist, urged the farmers to cultivate new markets for their cocoa—possibly a rhetorical device: “We encourage you to seek other buyers, to encourage a competitive market. It’s the only way that you can convince yourself that you are getting a good deal from us.”