Chocolate Used As Money

Ever since people came to like the taste of chocolate it's been a very popular and desired food. People began to trade for other goods using chocolate as money. This was called bartering. According to sixteenth century Spanish chronicle, rabbits were worth ten beans and a donkey was worth fifty beans! By the seventeenth century it was an expensive luxury only the upper class could buy.

Chocolate as a Commodity

A commodity is an agricultural product that can be turned into a commercial product, like food stuff. Coffee, sugar, orange juice and cacao are farmed, harvested and turned into products people like you and me love to buy. A whopping 3 million tons of raw cacao, worth $5.1 billion, are produced around the world each year.

Commodities are traded on the floors of the New York Board of Trade and the London International Financial Futures Exchange. These exchanges bring buyers and sellers of a commodity together and set prices for that commodity; the price that cacao will sell for. Things that are mined like minerals, gold and copper are commodities too. So are the fuels we use every day. People bid on the "futures" or what price the commodity will sell for in three to 6 months. These prices will have an effect on how much we will pay for a candy bar.

Chocolate is a sought-after stock market commodity.

Cocoa is traded as a commodity but many chocolatiers, makers of chocolate candy, are publicly held companies whose stocks are traded on exchanges around the world. Some of the company names that trade in chocolate are: Nestle, Ferrero, Cadbury, Mars and Hershey. These companies are the top 10 global chocolate manufacturers. According to Business Week, sales of chocolate in the U.S. reached $15.6 billion in 2006. This means that chocolate is a commodity buyers want whether it is in the food market or the stock market.

Dark Chocolate candies are becoming very popular but, kids still love the milk chocolate. People are paying more for the more expensive brands of chocolate. This is good for the buyers and sellers of cacao commodities and stocks because, they can make more money.

The Story of Fair Trade Chocolate

While thousands of people like you and me, are enjoying delicious milk and dark chocolate treats everyday, some children are not enjoying chocolate at all.

Hundreds of small farmers in the Ivory Coast area of Africa are using young children to cut down and open the cacao pods. The children want to work to help their families get more money. After the young boys sign up to work on these farms they have to work very long hours. The heat is terrible. There isn't a lot of food for them to eat. Mostly cooked bananas day after day. I would want to leave a job like this and some of the boys try to. When they are captured they are beaten and locked up at night so they can't run away again. Some have worked for two years and haven't gotten one penny for their work. The farmers tell the boy slaves they don't have any extra money after the crop of cacao is harvested and sold. They need to take care of their own families first and pay expenses for the farm. The farmers blame the slavery on the price of cacao. They want the price paid for cacao to be higher. The farmers think the chocolate companies don't want the price to go up so they can keep the price of candy down.

The chocolate companies are trying to stop the slavery by not buying cacao harvested by farmers that have slaves. The big chocolate companies have joined together to form the World Cocoa Foundation. They promise to support farms without slaves. They are trying to help farmers raise better crops and not have to worry about the diseases that attack the cacao tree. They are also trying to raise the price paid for cacao slowly so the slavery will stop.