Ghana will no longer export cocoa to Switzerland

Ghana wants to stop exporting raw cocoa, and instead export finished chocolate. According to THIS, Ghana is responsible for 57% of Switzerlands cocoa, so this would pose a serious issue for the Swiss chocolate industry (and probably a lot of other countries chocolate industries as well, since Ghana produces 45% of the worlds cocoa…though Wiki says they’re responsible for only 18%). Ghana is of course taking a risk: if their home grown chocolate sucks, then they will have spent a lot building infrastructure, will have lost raw cocoa sales, and won’t sell much processed chocolate. Even if it doesn’t suck, it won’t be Swiss chocolate, and that matters to a lot of people for whom this sort of thing matters.

One is left to wonder what the Swiss will do. They import north of 44,000 tons of cocoa, and would have to start looking for alternative sources. Ecuador and Mexico and the like would probably want to step up, unless they, too, decide that processing it locally makes sense.

Growing the cocoa there in Switzerland seems unlikely due to the cocoa tree being a distinctly tropical plant. Still: it might make sense to try for local production. It might make sense for Switzerland to not only try growing cocoa trees in hothouses (possibly in warrens of tunnels carved through the hills and mountains), but also via hydroponics, though genetic manipulation (get coca beans growing on vines or something, or from mutant peanut or taters, I dunno) or even purely synthetically. If Switzerland can pull this off, they’ll be not only independent of reliance upon volatile third world imports and politics, they’ll have new agricultural technologies and techniques to sell. The developed world could, say, turn skyscrapers into high-tech farms for the production of spices and such that are currently produced only in equatorial regions. At last the modern world could divorce itself from dependency upon the third world, not only ending the need to send them our money, but also ending the heartache of the poverty stricken folks of the undeveloped countries knowing that evil westerners are appropriating their cultures. Imagine the joy that would spread through the cocoa farmers of Ghana as they saw their exports of cocoa dry up utterly, their farms returning to a state of nature, as they know that they are no longer participating in the evil Europeans appropriation of Aztec culture.

A notion: an early product of asteroid mining could be Island Three habitats given over entirely to the production of “luxury” raw agricultural materials. There would have to be a thriving trade in water and carbon and such going *to* the habs to counter the raw materials going down, but this would only serve to make space flight all that much cheaper. A secondary – and probably necessary – product of the asteroid mining would be the silica processed out of the asteroids. This could be dropped from low orbit  in the form of “cannonballs” a meter or two in diameter as a gentle incentive for the refugee boats full of starving Ghanaian cocoa farmers to turn back.

The Swiss chocolate industry is already in trouble enough thanks to the Pinko Pox, with revenues down more than 10%. That works out to a loss of more than $400 million… and that’s based just on a decrease in tourism. Imagine what it’ll be when their supply of cocoa starts getting rather thin. Billions of dollars could fund some interesting new technologies, all of which would be useful not only for chocolatiers but for modern mankind as a whole. The daily Lindt-SpaceX shuttle to the ChocoHab in geosynchronous orbit could make for an inspiring sight.