Assignment: Ivory Coast's cocoa crisis

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From the journey from cocoa to chocolate in Ivory Coast. The price of cocoa - the essential ingredient in chocolate - has more than quadrupled on the international market in the last two years. Yet many of those growing it have not benefitted. In fact, drought, disease and a lack of investment have led to catastrophic harvests and, therefore, a drop in income for many small producers of cocoa, especially in Ivory Coast. This West African country is the world’s largest producer of cocoa - up to 45% of the world’s total. Most of the growers are small-scale, poor farmers. There are now calls for these growers to get a bigger chunk of the chocolate bar and, in so doing, to help ensure future production. John Murphy travels to Ivory Coast to delve into the world of chocolate production.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You may have noticed recently if you go and buy a bar of chocolate is either shrunk with shrink
0:04.5	flation or it's become significantly more expensive and in many cases it's both of those things.
0:10.6	Do you wonder why? Well that's what I went to try and find out in Ivory Coast. So thank you for
0:15.4	downloading this edition of Assignment, which comes from Côte d'Ivoire. I hope you might
0:25.0	might be able to hear the scrape of the mud and the stones under this
0:29.8	full by four.
0:32.0	Come on, come on. This leg of the journey in the west of Ivory Coast was
0:38.5	230 kilometers or so, not too long, I hoped.
0:43.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:47.0	I'm John Murphy, on assignment in this French-speaking West African country.
0:53.0	Well, we're still going almost eight hours after we set off.
0:58.0	The road was quite good to start with, but now it's just absolutely terrible. So far we have survived several near misses getting stuck in the mud.
1:08.4	We've seen plenty of trucks completely stuck. You can see why it might be pretty difficult to get the cocoa to the market from this area.
1:20.0	We're doing this in the dark now because it's taken so long.
1:27.0	Don't really fancy spending the night here in this car.
1:32.0	Hey, Brian, I just turn that off with you a sec, the music.
1:35.0	It's a little bit muddy and messy, isn't it?
1:38.0	It's very messy. The red is muddy and there are a lot of pot holes, there are a lot of pot holes, a lot of big holes.
1:44.0	Yeah, they're more than just pot holes.
1:46.0	They're huge.
1:47.0	Very, extremely huge.
1:49.0	And you know, against lorries.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.