A Future Without Chocolate

By Anyi Li

Can you imagine a world without chocolate? I know, it sounds awful. However, recent evidence has all pointed to a probable future world without chocolate. 

The primary ingredient within chocolate is cacao--a plant that has an enduring history that we can trace all the way back to the pre-colonial Aztec and Inca Empires. At the time, cacao was a cultural, ceremonial drink that the Native Americans viewed as sacred. It was not meant to mix with sugar, milk, nuts, and fruits. After the European colonization of the Americas, they added sugar into cacao drinks to neutralize the slightly bitter, spicy taste of cacao. It was a drink to which only the very rich had access. It was not until the industrial revolution that people made cacao drinks into widely affordable and popular chocolate bars. Later on, Europeans transformed many African, American, and Asian colonies near the Equator into nationwide plantations with cacao as the cash crop with the expanding western colonialism and imperialism. Even after the post-colonialism today, these regions continue to grow cacao.

Cacao can only grow within 10-15 degrees north and south of the Equator. Yet in recent years, El Nino, an atmospheric phenomenon caused by global warming, has brought extreme rainfall and drought to many regions of the world, hitting the regions near the Equator particularly hard. Many cacao production centers were impacted, including West Africa, Indonesia, and Ecuador. While the demand for chocolate (which also means demand for cacao) grows annually, a 2014 estimate predicts a 250,000 tonnes shortage for cacao worldwide, and 40,000 metric tonnes loss of cacao will occur in Ecuador alone in 2015. Moreover, an Amazonian fungus, otherwise known as the witches-broom disease, has swept Brazil. This fungus destroyed most Brazil’s cacao plantations and infected many former cacao farmers with a skin disorder. Due to this disease, Brazil fell from the second-largest exporter of cacao to only sustainable to its internal national market while still suffering from climate change.

If the witches-broom disease continues to sweep the world, and if the climate continues to change unchecked for the worse, then in the near future, we will very likely face the gloomy reality that we have no chocolate to eat, or at least no chocolate that we can easily afford to eat.