Comment Re:Why isn't then the price exploding ? (Score 1) 323
I am willing to bet that there is some non-free-market shenanigan going on here.
If the price of cocoa was exploding, then people would plant them...When reality does not follow the course your ideology says it should, sometimes it's not the result of fraud. Sometimes it means your ideology is bunk.
Otherwise as cocoa goes missing the producer would get better price, and more people would plant them..
Saith TFA, "The problem is, for one, a supply issue. Dry weather in West Africa (specifically in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where more than 70 percent of the world's cocoa is produced) has greatly decreased production in the region. A nasty fungal disease known as frosty pod hasn't helped either. The International Cocoa Organization estimates it has wiped out between 30 percent and 40 percent of global coca production. Because of all this, cocoa farming has proven a particularly tough business, and many farmers have shifted to more profitable crops, like corn, as a result....For these reasons, cocoa prices have climbed by more than 60 percent since 2012, when people started eating more chocolate than the world could produce."