There are a very few things in life that i enjoy tasting more than a great piece of chocolate. Good chocolate pairs nicely with a bold Merlot or Cabernet Sauvingnon. Its nice for an after dinner mini-desert or a morning pick-me-up with some coffee. Quality dark chocolate, greater than 65% cocoa, has medicinal value as well, it lowers blood pressure, is full of anti-oxidants, stimulate endorphin production, it contains the anti-depressant serotonin, and the stimulants caffeine and theobromine.
This information doesn’t mean that you should eat a pound of chocolate a day. Chocolate is still a high-calorie, high-fat food. Most of the studies done used no more than 100 grams, or about 3.5 ounces, of dark chocolate a day to get the benefits.
One bar of dark chocolate has around 400 calories. If you eat half a bar of chocolate a day, you must balance those 200 calories by eating less of something else. Cut out other sweets or snacks and replace them with chocolate to keep your total calories the same.
The only problem with cocoa is that 40% of it grows in the Ivory Coast…and here comes the trouble:
Alistair Dawber: Conflict in Abidjan could destabilise cocoa market
As laurent Gbagbo clings on to power in Abidjan, one unforeseen consequence of the post-election crisis in Ivory Coast may be a surge in the price of chocolate.
The West African country produces about 40 per cent of the world’s raw cocoa – one of the key ingredients in chocolate. As the political situation worsens, the price of cocoa has spiked because commodity traders worry there could be a supply shortage.
Before last month’s disputed elections prompted a stand-off between President Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara, whom the international community recognises as having won the vote, the price of cocoa had bucked the upwards trend of other commodities in the previous 12 months and fell from more than $3,000 (£1,950) per ton to a little more than $2,600.
But the belligerence of the two protagonists with designs on the Ivorian presidency since the vote on 28 November has unsettled the $5.1bn global cocoa market, leading to a jump of more than 12 per cent in its price, pushing it back up above the $3,000-a-ton mark in recent days.
About 8 per cent of the average chocolate bar made up of cocoa, and with manufacturers and retailers’ balance sheets still affected by the economic downturn, there is a strong chance these extra costs will be passed on to the consumer. If the crisis in Ivory Coast continues – or gets worse as many fear it will – the cost of chocolate next Christmas could be significantly higher.
We need to resurrect Executive Outcomes and put an end to this right now.
Rodan Update: Gates of Vienna had a great article about the crisis in the Ivory Coast. Once again the West is backing Muslims over Christians.
What this article and others like it don’t tell you is that we are witnessing one of those watershed moments in history: Ivory Coast is about to toggle from a (mostly) Christian country to a Muslim country. The winner of the election is a Muslim — the head of the Muslim rebel forces in the north of the country — and the loser is a non-Muslim. Ivory Coast is on the verge of officially joining the Ummah.
The report below cites the surge of illegal immigrants from Ivory Coast’s Muslim neighbors as the cause of Mr. Ouattara’s victory. However, Ivory Coast is already a member of the OIC, and as of the 2004 figures in my database, it had a population of 17,298,040, with 6,677,043 Muslims. That’s 38.6%, which is already past the point where you would expect the imposition of sharia. What is happening now is simply the formal handing-over of the keys.
Muslims do not need to be in the majority to force Islamic rule on a country. They simply need to be present in numbers sufficient to terrorize, threaten, bribe, and defraud their way into power. The exact percentage varies according to circumstances, but absent intervention from an external force, full Islamization can be expected by the time a country becomes 40% Muslim.
Read the rest: Ivory Coast Joins the Ummah
Before we begin Obama bashing, Bush backed France’s invasion to prevent a Christian victory in 2004. This is a bipartisan problem America has, we tend to back the Muslim side in a conflict.
Tags: chocolate, commodity pricing, ivory coast
