Date of publication: November 11, 2007
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Author: Elizabeth Bryant
(11-11) 04:00 PST Fangolo, Ivory Coast -- In this village of dirt-poor cocoa farmers, Issa Wattara is a lucky man: He has tasted chocolate. "It's sweet, very sweet," recalled Wattara, 67, as he surveyed the leafy cocoa plants growing at the edge of his village, the pods hanging down like fat cucumbers. "But it's very expensive. People here don't have the means to buy chocolate."
Cocoa beans are harvested and shipped from Fangolo, a scattered collection of wooden and concrete shacks of 3,000 inhabitants hugging the main north-south artery near the Mali border. The village, along with the rest of Ivory Coast's western cocoa belt, once bankrolled one of Africa's most prosperous economies. The area still accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world's production - with about a quarter of that heading to the United States, according to the London-based International Cocoa Organization...