Swiping Chocolate, by the bag full

The robberies that made chocolate and divided the world.

I don’t know why the European and American love for chocolate is as deep as it is, why it has such universal resonance and enjoys such ubiquity, but I have a hunch it has to do with power. The power is one unquestioned and yet unquenched, made possible through countless thefts and atrocities difficult to describe, and its a power that people do not yet seem ready to recognize, let alone relinquish.

Translucent new growth on our old growth cacao tree, backlit by the early morning sun. Photo by Steven Casanova.

I grappled with this power as a middle schooler, about twelve years old, when, in a minuscule way, I was apart of the chocolate trade. Likely against my parents’ advise, but more likely without their knowledge, I sold candy during lunch. Not as a school fundraiser or extra curricular activity, I was hustlin. Halloween candy, on the Monday after, when most of the privileged kids had already eaten theirs. These were the kids who were not only sent to school with lunch money - full price, not reduced - but extra on top for snacks. Hershey’s has no contract with Virginia Public Schools - those are reserved for Department of Defense rations and Tyson’s mechanically separated chicken parts¹ - so slinging Reese’s from my lunch box was an easy market to corner.

For my peers, I was selling more than just sugar and fat, I was selling the power to have what both the school board and our parents agreed shouldn’t be for lunch. Kids tore the wrappers off with a fiendish assertion of their own buying power, they deserved this chocolate. By the end of the first week I was already buying to restock, and by the second I was buying in bulk. Kids would come to my table throughout the lunch period, tell me what they needed, and we’d make the exchange look like I was just sharing some of my packed lunch. We passed the money in a dap, exact change preferred. In the 45 minutes of lunch period, I could eat my tuna sandwich, maybe finish the homework I’d half-assed the night before, and move enough chocolate to come home with some $25 in, mostly, quarters. Every Friday the Coinstar machine showed triple digit receipts. Kids came to my locker asking for candy long after lunch with a certain urgency, some with a tone of privilege and annoyance, others with desperation and heart break. I realized the Cocoa Puffs commercials weren’t just saying cocoa is delicious, they wanted our generation to lose our minds when the stuff ran out. A couple of those same heartbroken kids became regulars, and were regularly skipping lunch to use all their money on candy. Other kids, seeing how much money I was making, started asking if I’d hire them, possibly so they could have more money to buy more candy, and witty kids in different lunch periods were pitching me on expanding. I felt like Neno Brown, watching my classmates change all around me.

It wasn’t long before I had competition, though I had the edge on the supplier. We weren’t the school lunch money type of household but we did have Sam’s Club money. The competition had what they could get from the Dollar General down the road, a regional franchise that sells overpriced knock offs in food deserts². It’s the dollar store that sells things for a dollar, generally. So when the other kids couldn’t compete on prices or brands, they started swiping chocolate, by the bag full (easy to do at Dollar General since it was always understaffed and half the lights flickered) and selling it for practically nothing, everything was profit. My first lesson in free trade. When kids caught wind of how easy it was to steal from Dollar General, there was a sort of candy rush which spread across the store to become a whatever-can-fit-in-a-backpack rush. Looting never happens in isolation. The franchise owners eventually went to our principal and I ended up in his office lined up next to a bunch of kids I barely knew. “Where’d you all get that chocolate?” he asked, with a tone that said we were guilty no matter our responses. I didn’t keep any Sam’s Club receipts and so the chocolate was no more mine than it was any of my classmates’. But it was also no more the franchise owner’s, nor was it Hershey’s. We’d all been just a small part of a big, long, generational robbery which would not be solved by in-school suspension. With no way to prove anyone stole anything, we were all sent back to class and the entire district was later informed that the city added a new rule to the code of conduct which they didn’t know was necessary. From then on, students were banned from selling anything in school for personal profit. My school, however, thought it a great idea and started an official school store later that year, staffed by students and the school kept the money. It had been my market, but it in was their world.

Cacao beans drying in the sun. The beans begin white and fruity, by this stage they have developed chocolately notes that will be deepened in the following toasting stage. Photo by Steven Casanova.

The chocolate theft began with a bunch of lost European sailors. We’ve heard the story plenty times before. It happens around the same time that the regular extraction of riches from a small archipelago earned our home the name Puerto Rico³. These lost sailors, bankrolled by powerful oligarchs and officials of other nations⁴, encountered indigenous nations in a part of the world they did not know existed a few years earlier. But most importantly, it was a part of the world where none of their police, judges, or juries could see them. As far as their society was concerned; they were on a different planet, a New World. Compounded by the fact that they were squandering other peoples’ money, they felt entitled, and also desperate, to come back with something. On this New World, they did whatever they wanted, experimenting with the worst crimes imaginable in order to return to the Old World with riches of any kind - minerals, food, artifacts, people. It is precisely the separation between worlds, the creation of a “new world”, that justified the crimes. The surviving accounts from crew members and witnesses are gut wrenching and do not easily leave the conscience. I can never erase from my mind the illustration of a medieval torture device these Europeans used which at once included ropes, dogs, and fire. The near complete extermination of tens of millions of people came swiftly. It was during the process of exterminating the Maya that Europeans first tasted cacao, the food that was so important to them it flowed densely through society, feeding spiritual ceremonies and paying military salaries.

Settler colonialism as an economic strategy (and self-assigned destiny) requires theft, facilitated by genocide, to acquire lands, and subsequently demands theft of human labor, underpaid or unpaid, facilitated by the dismantling of societies, to make the lands profitable. The thefts of lands, lives, and labor across the Americas, and every Atlantic and Pacific island they charted can be considered the original robberies of European colonization. We know these robberies intimately, the legacies of the thieves surround us, their names and images immortalized in the very understanding of how the world came to be.⁵

The loot, literally enough to build nations, funded and supplied the Industrial Revolution of the “developed” countries, which eventually pushed capitalism beyond slavery. The cornerstone of the European chattel slave system, white supremacy, is a logic principally driven by fear. The constant fear of African revolt, especially after Haiti fucked up their whole system, was at odds with European capitalist growth. Guyanese historian Dr. Walter Rodney explains that, “people can be forced to perform simple manual labor, but very little else. This was proven when Africans were used as slaves in the West Indies and America. Slaves damaged tools and carried out sabotage, which could only be controlled by extra supervision and by keeping tools and productive processes very elementary. Slave labor was unsuitable for carrying out industrial activity, so that in the U.S.A. the North went to war in 1861 to end slavery in the South. So as to spread true capitalist relations throughout the land.”⁶ Rodney’s classic “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” has been pivotal in changing the narrative of European saviorism and challenges the very notion that the developed world became so by chance or destiny.

By the late 1800s, Europe and America had banned small business slavers from the slave trading economy and called it abolition. They preserved slavery in the form it still exists in today: of forced prison labor on projects of the state, on massive plantations, and in the production stages of supply chains, in poor countries. Instead of stealing people from the West African coast, they used the fruits of the original robbery, namely industrialized weapons, to turn their exploits towards the interior of Africa. A profit rush ensued in 1881, a desperate “Scramble” of Europeans racing to conquer and claim every African acre as European owned. White men gathered for three months in Berlin to organize the robbery. The continent was arbitrarily divided and arranged, and the people of many nations forced to live, and die, under one foreign flag, toiling in mines or monocultures for foreign profits. In just thirty three years the conquer of eleven million square miles was complete.⁷ This was the second robbery. Today’s biggest chocolate sellers first started selling the stuff during this robbery - Hershey (1894), Cadbury (1897), Nestle (1904), Tolberone (1908), Mars (1911).

Cacao beans fermenting in their own juices. The fruity liquid becomes the most amazing alcohol in the process. The beans darken as they ferment and dry. Photo by Steven Casanova.

The third robbery is no less awful than the first two, but it’s more revealing of the relationship Europe and the U.S. wanted to establish with the world. Colonies, already robbed clean of their people, resources, and freedom, were to be continually robbed through the process of underdevelopment. Through educational, economic, political, and industrial deprivation and force, what amounts to torture slowed down and spread out over generations, Europe and the U.S. could destroy the rest of the world to such an extent that they would agree to work for pennies. An international division labor was created between the deadly manual labor in the colonies and the relatively higher paid factory and skilled labor in Europe, and it ensured sustainable plunder. Dr. Rodney explains that colonialism, by its nature, was against the establishment of industries in Africa and Latin America, outside of agriculture and the extractive industries of mining and lumber. It is why Mexican chocolate is characteristically coarse, unlike Swiss or German chocolate which is industrially smooth. Whenever Africans pushed towards industrialization, they were deliberately blocked by the colonial governments acting on behalf of European business. “Ground-nut oil mills we set up in Senegal in 1927 and began exports to France. They were soon placed under restrictions because of protests of oil-millers in France. Similarly in Nigeria, the oil mills set up by the Lebanese were discouraged. The oil was still sent to Europe as a raw material for industry, but European industrialists did not then welcome even the simple stage of processing groundnuts into oil on African soil.” As a result of the non-industrialization policy, Sudanese and Ugandans grew cotton but imported manufactured cotton goods, and Ivory Coast grew cacao for which they were paid nothing and imported chocolate too luxurious to afford. The lives of many a colonial subject were spent harvesting and extracting resources from their own lands to pad foreign bank accounts. Beginning in the Second World War and continuing for years after, Britain repaid wartime loans received from the U.S. in tin, rubber, and cacao shipped directly from their colonies in Africa. Cacao farmers were forced to trade the fruits of their labor for weapons of their subjugation. In 1947 alone, west African cocoa made Britain over 100 million dollars, essentially none of it returning to Africans.

The destruction World War II left on Europe created an opportunity for African colonies to free themselves, and before the dust settled, a wave of independence engulfed the continent. But Europeans would never allow free, let alone equal, African nations to exist, not in their world. So they created even more worlds. The terms first world and third world (and second) technically refer to how countries aligned in the socialism vs capitalism struggle of the US-Soviet Cold War. First and second are, generally, the white nations that make up the two sides of the conflict. Third world is the rest, the countries that were not permitted to matter in global politics. As we know, though, the title today makes no allusion to Cold War politics, it just means poor nation, part of a different world, primed for, and deserving of, plundering.

Young cacao tree, about two years old. New leafs start bright red and become translucent as they turn light green then deep forest green. The trees will being to produce in two or three more years. Photo by Steven Casanova.

As a child I spent many summers escaping Virginia in my abuelas house in Guaynabo. The memories of those summers are colored by blue sky above me as I laying the quenepa tree stuffing my face, of being submerged in my abuelos hammock, of feeding chickens and learning to kill them for dinner, and eating dripping mango slices passed on the tip of a machete. I always felt most comfortable here, surrounded by sun and rain, yelling roosters and dogs, and people who did not see me as different because of my melanin. It was on the flights between the two homes, as I got older, that I learned that the differences extended beyond good food and genuine smiles. White people are often oblivious when they trap non white people in an offensive conversation, especially on airplanes. And so at the first clue to my Puerto Ricanness and the revelation that, while we are both traveling to see family, my family lives where theirs vacations, many a white person has jumped on the opportunity to ask me all kinds of questions they could have easily googled. Baked into questions of safety, disaster recovery, and debt are investigations of how many multitudes more poor we are than they are. Occasionally its a much more revealing question: “isn’t Puerto Rico a third world country?”

Technically, no, dumbass, we are part of the U.S., we are U.S. citizens and fly the U.S. flag. But I do not take it personally; statistically speaking, half of the people that just read that were yet unaware. And as far as the U.S. is concerned, we are not a country at all, just a colony, or a “Free Associated State” - a term used to satisfy the U.N. decolonization committee without truly abolishing the colonial relationship. But simply presenting the facts betrays the truth underlying the question. Their vacations, the ways Puerto Rico is covered in U.S. media, and how it exists in U.S. pop culture tells them that Puerto Rico is not only poor and rendered unimportant to global affairs, but it is also full of brown people who are deserving of exploitation, somewhere far away in another world. As Trump said, Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water.” and so we should be grateful for paper towels as disaster aid.

What kept Puerto Ricans from receiving real emergency supplies they needed after Hurricane Maria was the Jones Act. It rerouted aid sent from neighboring nations and delayed recovery for many critical weeks. 4,645⁸ people died while recovery efforts stalled. The Jones Act was established a century ago, at the height of the second colonial robbery, to protect the U.S. shipping industry. By law, any goods traveling from two U.S. ports must be sent on U.S. built, flagged, and crewed ships. Basically, the U.S. was not able to compete in the free trade capitalist system they insisted the world participate in, and so needed to tip the scales. Free trade has never been free for black and brown people. The protection of the U.S. shipping industry is paid for by Puerto Ricans in everything that we buy. It is not just simply that everything is imported, it’s that by virtue of being a U.S. colony we have to then pay an extra set of tariffs to the U.S. to receive it. And beyond that, there’s an infuriating list of U.S. companies that don’t ship here at all, affecting Puerto Rico’s access to all types of goods. The rigid walls between international trade markets forces substandard quality upon poor nations, literal captive markets, while automatically knocking poor sellers of all kinds out of the global market. As a trade barrier between two nations, the Jones Act functions as a sanction, costing Puerto Rico half a billion dollars annually, and sanctions are war by another name.

Ludicrous as it is, the reality we live in is that which was crafted by Trump, by Obama, by Bush and by all others who have created and maintained a separation between their world and our world. My second flight, from Chicago, home of the Domino sugar empire, to San Juan, bordered by sugar cane plantations bankrupted by soil depletion, may as well be space travel. And once Alex and I finally moved our permanent address to this part of so-called U.S. soil, we relinquished many of the rights we were born with: to vote for presidents, representatives, and senators, to access the same amount of food stamps, Medicaid, and social security insurance⁹, and also to access free trade, accessible public education, and healthcare and equal Constitutional protections. People in Puerto Rico cannot buy from the online stores in Philly, have any say on federal laws, or receive the same federal aid that we were already receiving in New York before moving home. In all fairness, the reality of Puerto Rico’s subjugation backs up my fellow passengers’ offensive questions. The Puerto Rican world has, in fact, been made third.

Hershey, Pennsylvania began as a factory town. In the third world factory towns are shanty towns that are isolated, dangerous, and controlled with an iron fist by the company. In the first world, there was picnic and boating, but there was still strikes. Screenshot from Hersheys.com.

In between colonizer and colony, running the logistics of the robbery we find marketing boards and trading companies. They obfuscated the connection between the poor chocolate workers that struck in Hershey’s Pennsylvania factory town in 1937 and the poor cacao farmers that struck across all of Ghana months later. The cacao farmer’s holdup gained nationwide momentum and was able to sustain for months, fucking up the global chocolate trade. In response, the cacao buyers changed the rules of the game and took tighter control of the trade. The European Marketing Board was created to cut out the African brokers that dealt between African farmers and European trading companies. The first head of the British Cocoa Marketing Board was none other than John Cadbury, director of Cadbury Brothers. It sold to the British Ministry of Food at incredibly low prices, in exchange for military protection of the robbery, and the Ministry in turn sold to British manufacturers, making profits as high as 11 million pounds in some years. The Board also sold loot to the U.S., the largest market, where prices were very high. None of the profits went back to the African farmer, but instead represented British foreign exchange in American dollars.¹⁰

Screenshot from CFAO group’s website. This is their homepage. Business today so clearly comes from colonialism of yesterday.

Trading companies, on the other hand, go back to the beginnings of colonization itself.  They amassed wealth in the same way that my middle school candy competition did - if they stole what they sold, everything was profit. They have served on the frontlines for the colonizing nations, state funded and with full governing and military powers.

British East India Company. (England)

United Africa Company. (England)

Royal African Company. (England)

Royal Niger Company. (England)

Royal Philippine Company. (Spain)

Guinea Company of London. (England)

Guinea Company of Scotland. (Scotland)

Northwest Cameroon Company. (Germany)

South Cameroon Company. (Germany)

Portuguese East India Company. (Portugal)

Company of the American Islands. (France)

China Company. (France)

Dutch East India Company. (Netherlands)

Dutch West India Company. (Netherlands)

Danish West India Company. (Denmark)

French West India Company. (France)

Swedish West India Company. (Sweden)

Mississippi Company. (France)

Virginia Company. (England)

Etcera.

Within a few hundred years, the world was dredged of its life in order to develop the European and American projects. The trading companies gained control of everything. Unilever, the world’s largest producer of soap, also deals in bottled water, ice cream, coffee, pet food, and pharmaceuticals, and has a history in running the Niger Company, one of the most notorious exploiters of nineteenth-century Africa. From 1885 to 1897 the Niger Company had full governmental and police powers which they used to exploit Nigerians ruthlessly while establishing their empire.¹¹ The big French trading firms CFAO and SCOA did the same. SCOA, founded during the height of Nigerian colonization, deals in large construction equipment, agricultural machinery, medical technology, and motor vehicles, everything needed to build a nation. CFAO, Africa’s largest distribution network, also draws profits from the industries of automotive, healthcare, agriculture, and infrastructure, and while they boast 170 years of “developing” Africa, they still today expropriate the profits to their headquarters in France.

Ripe yellow and orange cacao pods piled up on our truck bed. We dried the pods to make black soap. Photo by Steven Casanova.

At the top of our mountain is a huge cacao tree that’s easily as old as my parents. It stands 20 feet tall and spreads its deep green droopy leaves 25 feet wide. For the half the year, fruit pods that begin as small as a pea cling to the sides of branches and around the trunk as they slowly grow to the size of footballs. This tree is of the trinitario variety, the most coveted for richness in flavor, and the pods that begin white go through a metamorphosis of vibrant red, gray, white again, red again, orange, and finally ripe yellow. The neighborhood has enjoyed the fruits of this tree for decades and everyone has a childhood memory of either cutting the fruit young and eating the beans raw or obsessing over the chocolate it made that could never be bought in a store.

Cocoa is highly processed cacao that has had its fat and flavor industrially removed and is often premixed with sugar. Cacao, on the other hand, is picked fresh from our trees, fermented, sun dried, toasted, ground and then steeped with cinnamon sticks or malagueta (a highly medicinal leaf that tastes like what Froot Loops wishes it was) and sweetened with maple or date syrup, to make a rich, nutritious, euphoric, hunger-quenching, and energy boosting beverage. We hope to be able to sell this so that we can afford to give away the farm produce to our community.

If we buy any chocolate at all, it’s usually the darkest chocolate available at any bougie market, Alter Eco’s Classic Blackout bar, 85% cacao. While they make a tasty chocolate, Alter Eco is one of those brands that rely more on selling the virtues of the product rather than the product itself - the ideology of the product that makes it so desirable.

Because of this, they’ve positioned themselves as a leader in sustainable, organic, fair trade, carbon neutral chocolate production, and many other brands follow their same scheme, some going as far to tell you up front that buying this chocolate will help poor brown people. My interest was first piqued with Alter Eco, and it is the reason you are reading this article, when I folded back the bar’s label and saw the words “restores forests” with the invitation to read more inside. Which is like suggesting sugar cane restores grasslands. You see, because the land of brown nations is considered important, yet the ways brown people use their land to make a living are not, the world’s poor are blamed for the climate crisis (and their own poverty) by using their land irresponsibly. So Alter Eco is here claiming to hand hold the farmers of poor nations through addressing the problems that corporations of rich nations cause.

Inside of Alter Eco chocolate bar packaging. It makes no sense to have “timber trees” next to crop. How will you cut it? Banana “trees” grow wild and when in this density rarely produce fruit. Shade trees have been used in conventional cacao farming for generations. But what matters not is the content of the photo, it’s the greenwash that is important. Photo by Steven Casanova.

The rest of the packaging elaborates on the claim that this chocolate is good for the environment because it’s affect on soil fertility, biodiversity, and carbon absorption. What they are referring to are the terms of the contracts signed in fair trade agreements. No employee of Alter Eco affects any of this, it is instead the poor farmers who are paid a tiny bonus above market levels in exchange for changing their farming methods to meet Alter Eco standards. Since the creation of the third world and the subsequent robberies, it has been profitable to denounce exploitation while selling an alternative. This birthed the fair trade movement. Beginning around the same time, climate anxiety, the worsening environmental catastrophe, began its slow creep into the conscious of the rich nations. It sparked the green movement. The two intersect in the packaging of this chocolate bar, an ideological wrapping that makes swallowing atrocities easier.

Alex and I have become acutely aware of how greenwashed agriculture, what we have nicknamed Instagram farming, is harming rural communities. We moved here two years ago to join a group of young farmers we’d worked with for years. We were lured by the ideological talk on agroecology, natural construction, and liberation, and their poems about soil fertility, biodiversity, and carbon absorption, and spent years doing free labor for, donating to, and encouraging others to donate to, what we were convinced made a difference. Ultimately they were small businesses concealed with a shiny green wash and, if I may, red wash, with communist language masking capitalist goals. They bring together other land owning college graduates to barter in bok choy and blue eggs, ignoring, even ostracizing, the long time community.¹² The superficial networks that are developed to support the ideologies have, in retrospect unsurprisingly, ruptured, and as a result of a complete aversion to accountability, since it was never a real community to begin with, Alex and I got screwed over and left with no option but to set up a tent in the woods. As of writing this, we are still trying to construct our way out of that tent.

But that wasn’t the first time we’d been fooled by green and red lies, it’s the reason that all the community gardens and farms we poured into for years in Richmond, in service to a for-profit LLC that purports to be a food justice organization, have been abandoned. Leadership never really cared about the people living in section 8 neighborhoods that were used for the projects and have been even more reluctant to reckon with their own contributions to injustice. In hindsight, the Gram and the grant were always more important. Perhaps it is the daily erosion of trust and hope in the different systems we collectively depend on, like the food system, education system, or justice system, which creates the vacuum that allows con artists to make careers out of exploiting our fears.

The North American fair trade movement began in the 1960s with the retail outlet Ten Thousand Villages. The Mennonite organization responsible for TTV wanted to get more money in the hands of textile producers from Puerto Rico and Palestine, two lands connected by brutal occupation, exile, and forced poverty at the hands of the U.S. and the British/Zionist settler movement, respectively.¹³ They were selling capitalism and charity in as package deal that can both “break the cycle of generational poverty and ignite social change”. The success of fair trade marketing has spread to cover most items that rich nations depend on from poor nations - clothes, bags, jewelry, food, coffee, tea, alcohol, artisan crafts, furniture, health and beauty products, flowers, cotton, gold, fucking carbon credits - and has spawned “helping-by-selling” alternative trade organizations of all kinds. The idea of higher wages to people of poor nations is viewed as an unquestionable good; even the Wikipedia page for fair trade reads like the authors were paid off by the movement.

Alter Eco is not just a chocolate company, it is actually a French Alternative Trade Organization, a certified Benefit corporation, that moved headquarters to the U.S. and Australia. Like the French trading behemoths before it, Alter Eco is a NGO that can traffic in anything that poor nations sell - quinoa, chocolate, sugar, agave, vanilla, coconut oil - and claim to fix global poverty through new branding and long contracts. A nicer, greener capitalism that can heal the world while making the trade between Bocata and Brooklyn seem fair. Ndongo S. Sylla’s “The Fair Trade Scandal” gives an at once level headed and scathing critique of what has become a religion for people with disposable income and guilt about their role in the global heists. Sylla argues that the benefits of fair trade are minimal at best; for each dollar that consumer-activists pay for fair trade products, three cents of additional income goes to people in poor nations. That three cents is dependent on the disposable income and good will of rich countries, and comes with costs and risks ignored by fair trade advocates. Ultimately, fair trade is completely dependent upon the capitalist dynamic of extraction it professes to despise and therefore is benefiting off the very exploitation they denounce. Furthermore, rich nations only have disposable income because it was stolen in the first place. Sylla concludes, “In summary, if Fair Trade is increasingly perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a solution to global poverty, it is because its protagonists chose the easiest path when raising the issue of North-South partnership. This is a model so conciliatory in appearance that everyone stands to gain from it. It promises producers that the market system will not harm them as much as in the past. It aroused the pride of Northern consumers by elevating them to the status of politically committed global citizens whose purchasing power can transform millions of lives. It reassures ‘Big Capital’ that its stakes will not be harmed and that they can work together in a natural harmony of interests. As for institutions and governments in the North that do not have the time or willingness to help the poor, they find a new way out. Finally, regarding governments of the South, described as powerless, corrupt, inefficient and apathetic, Fair Trade offers to take on the issue of poverty under their nose. But it is precisely because this Fair Trade is ‘fair’ to everyone that it is problematic.”

Cacao pods of the Forastero variety, which supplies 90% of the worlds chocolate simply because it produces a the most pods per tree. Foraster means foreigner in Spanish. Think about that. Photo by Steven Casanova.

Alter Eco has won awards regarding climate, veganism, and sustainability in the last few years, they even started the Alter Eco foundation for “world regeneration, one ecosystem at a time”. The people who do the real work of supposedly restoring forests are the poor people who sign their contracts. Meanwhile, nothing has changed between the dynamics which keep poor nations poor and the living conditions of chocolate farmers difficult. Fair trade thrives unabated, despite challenges, because of how little rich nations know about poor nations. The reason for the ignorance is that a knowledge of the role that poor nations played and plays in the world would reveal more about rich nations than rich nations would like to know. The issues faced today are much bigger, more complicated, and more deeply imbedded than unfair trade, they are borne of the destruction left on poor nations after repeated, compounding, robberies. The separation of worlds and the capitalism forced upon poor nations are why the world has chocolate at all, more expensive chocolate cannot possibly be the remedy. And it is to willingly lie to suggest that it could. In reality it is yet another robbery. The robbery people feel good about.

We are told, and have come to accept, that our poverty caused our poverty, as if it was in our culture to be poor, in what Ten Thousand Villages calls “the generational cycle of poverty”. It is this logic, which at once distances the U.S. based business from their country’s implications in the matter and also insists that outside help is needed to break the cycle. Foreign investment and intervention has, however, been the cause, and not solution, of global poverty. Poverty is neither cyclical nor generationally passed down, it is forced and reinforced daily. Any other interpretation is apologizing for the robberies that cause poverty.

Fair trade as a movement does not reject capitalism nor the infrastructure that produces inequity. It goes as far as to blame free trade capitalism for the poor conditions of Latino, Asian, and African farmers, yet are completely dependent on the same exploitative system to sell rich countries a solution to their guilt. The ideology of fair trade releases steam that would otherwise build up pressure to threaten the global trade machine, ultimately keeping poor nations poor while claiming things done changed.

Puerto Ricans know too well the implications of “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” strategies. It was the U.S. government’s Operation Bootstrap that aimed to industrialize Puerto Rico’s agricultural population. The U.S. wanted to show the world what a model “developing” country could look like¹⁴, a new extraction method masked by “do good” rhetoric. Yet, when the U.S. mastered the scheme, industry sought to make it more profitable by lower wages and so left Puerto Rico in a mass exodus, resulting in economic catastrophe. What happens to the third world when the first changes it’s mind about helping? What will be the fate of fair trade cacao farmers, who changed their entire farming operation, if Alter Eco one day dissolves by bankruptcy? What’s needed more than bootstraps is the removal of the boots off our necks.

The current politically correct term is global north and global south, seemingly acknowledging a shared globe, yet the searing separation of the binary remains. It hides behind a false generalization of geography which continues to imply distant and separate worlds, when the fact remains Israelis of the Global North pass by their Apartheid Wall on a daily basis in order to invade, evict, and kill Palestinians of the Global South.

What can I say about decolonization that Frantz Fanon has not already said over half a century ago? He has already asked Europeans to wake up and stop playing the game of Sleeping Beauty.¹⁵ It is an insult to pretend that the injustices of the world could ever be leveled by new capitalism when the rich still get rich off the poor. The majority of the world is not deserving of crumbs so that the minority may savor guilt free chocolate. To think otherwise is a settler pathology. There is no third world, and if there is it’s because the first world created it, which means that the first world needs it. The destiny of the universe depends on the first world asking why they need it. Why they do they feel like they deserve it, and insist that it exists?

1. When Alex and I lived in Richmond, one of my jobs involved pushing the Richmond City Health District further towards food justice. In meetings with leadership of Richmond Public Schools I learned that in the contract that permits free lunch to the entire city, the school district is basically given Monopoly money to purchase with, and the Department of Defense gets first dibs as supplier. Tyson just happens to be the second largest contract, possibly because of the many plants they have around Virginia.

2. I hesitate to reinforce the usage of this term, but it paints the picture the fastest. Namely, focusing on geographic area to represent marginalization, and while greatly informed by the legacy of redlining, is ultimately misleading and harmful. Food apartheid is a term closer to reality.

3. The Caribbean, or West Indies, can be understood, in relation to the Europeans who decided what happened there, as Wild West gold mines, brothels, and casinos, mixed in with labor camps, Indian Jones grave robbing, and jungle legends. This was not the reality for the Indigenous people from there or African people trafficked there, but it is the reason this group of islands got named Rich Port.

4. Patel, Raj. A History of The World in Seven Cheap Things. 2017. Patel describes in great detail the circumstances that birthed capitalism, and the relations of riches and nations that funded the beginnings of the European Slave Trade.

5. Beyond the statues, street, institutions, holidays, cities, even countries named after colonizers, even the person who seeks to negate their usual weight in history ends up orbiting around the world created by their influence. The sheer concepts of time and space are Eurocentric and thusly non Europeans are brought in under this matrix because of those colonizers.

6. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972.

7. Lindqvist, Sven. Exterminate All The Brutes. 1992.

8. There remains debate on the number. Some investigations estimate as high as 10,000. Official government numbers are as low as 36. 4,645 tends to be a common ground to agree on, but should be taken with a grain of salt. The fact is it was complete chaos and there’s no way to have an exact number of people who died in the many months of scare electricity, food, and water.

9. And elderly Puerto Rican was recently made by the U.S. Supreme Court to repay tens of thousands of dollars of federal aid he was entitled to and receiving while he lives in New York, that (without his knowledge) he was ineligible for when he returned home to Puerto Rico to care for family. The case was U.S. v. Vaello-Madero, 2021.

10. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972.

11. Again, Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972.

12. This will be discussed further in the future in talking about class and back to the land movements.

13. Syvlla, Ndongdo S. The Fair Trade Scandal. 2013. Our neighbor is a good example of the status of textile trade in Puerto Rico and other oppressed nations. She is brilliantly talented and can whip together complicated garments in minutes using her multiple industrial sewing machines. However, her contracts are for as little as fifty cents a shirt. Her highest paying gigs are boutique owners who pay her four dollars a piece and turn around and sell them for boutique prices. Just so you know.

14. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances and Grosfoguel, Ramón. Puerto Rican Jam. 1997.

15. Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. 1961.