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I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars.

Today we conclude our series Hershey vs. Mars. In our last episode, we heard about how Mars is pushed into the international market, turned to profit in China, which in turn drove the company to expand to other emerging markets across the globe.

And while that ambition certainly worked out for Mars on the business side, one major issue that's now facing the company and

the world for that matter carries some pretty dire consequences. We're talking about deforestation, the environmental impact of producing chocolate, certainly on the scale of a company like Mars.

It's actually astounding. The Washington Post reports that in 2017, 40 football fields of tropical forests were lost every single minute. All this spurred by the demand for cocoa and other goods like soybeans and palm oil.

And one trouble spot for chocolate producers in particular is West Africa, where deforestation is being driven by hundreds of thousands of poor cocoa farmers. For its part, Mars has vowed to switch entirely to sustainable cocoa by 2020, but check that calendar.

They've now decided to move the target date to 2025. Our guest today is Stephen Muffson. He's a reporter for the Washington Post, and he covers the business of climate change.

He recently wrote a wide-ranging article on the environmental impact of chocolate. And he's going to be joining us to talk about why producing environmentally sustainable chocolate is so hard. That's coming up next.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries Podcast American Scandal. Our newest series looks at the Kids for Cash Scandal, a story about two judges who stood accused of making millions of dollars in a brazen scheme that shattered the lives of countless children.

Listen to American Scandal on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Stephen Muffson, welcome to Business Wars. Glad to be here. For a sense of scale when we're talking about something like deforestation and for those of us who've never seen like a cocoa tree, what does it look like? How big a tree are we talking about here?

Well, the trees aren't very much larger than a person stands. Quite different from the older trees that they've been taking down to make room for cocoa plantations. Those older ones can be scores of feet tall.

So let's do a translation here. One tree equals what in terms of chocolate? Well, it isn't so much the tree as the number of beans, about 400 beans it takes to produce a pound of chocolate.

Wow, that seems like quite a lot of beans.

It is a lot of beans, especially when they're being taken out of these big pods by hand. And we have some great photographs of that with these kind of milky white beans being taken out of the pods and put out to dry.

Well, you're reporting specifically centers around deforestation for cocoa. And I think it probably be safe to say that most of our listeners don't know where this is happening. Could you put us on a map somewhere?

About two thirds of the other worlds cocoa comes from just two countries in West Africa. One's the ivory coast and one's Ghana. And they have a long history of producing cocoa there and they are the dominant players in the market.

Why Ghana and the ivory coast? Why these two places? Is it just the climate? Is it just the existing tree growth? Why these two places?

Well, that's a great question. I think a lot of it dates back to the colonial era when cocoa was taken from there not so much the United States but more to Britain and to France.

And I do think there are other parts of the world that you can grow cocoa, especially places like Peru. And it's possible that we may see more cocoa from those places over time. But I think there's a long tradition of doing it in this area.

Well, given that they are the dominant players in the market and I would imagine rather crucial for the incomes, the livelihoods of a lot of people in those places.

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