Chocolate in July

A July dipped in chocolate. Ate it, talked about it, thought about it, ate it, read about it, worried about it, ate it, wrote about it, and ate some more. Elsewhere in Dunedin, people rolled it down a sealed road on a hill.

One morning this week I phoned England to talk about it. England-based Dad, who knows of my fondness for fair trade, had forwarded a 36-page report called "The Great Hunger Lottery", just published by the World Development Movement.

I cannot explain its content because my understanding of complex things only lasts as long as I am reading about them, but it involved chocolate because it involved the prices of commodities, including cocoa.

Yes, so one morning, I phoned one of the British financial regulators. To set a scene, but not necessarily this one: it was shortly before 2am so I had a nice drowsy erudite drawl; because it was cold, my condensed breath added literary smoke-like wisps to the room; and because 2am is the golden hour when you're least inhibited yet still able to speak coherently, I sounded highly, yes highly articulate.

The World Development Movement had urged readers of its report to phone the regulator. The regulator is called the Financial Services Authority, and the woman on the line did that thing where they repeat what you say.

"So, you want to see position limits on food derivatives," she said.

"I do," I said. It was a bit like a wedding. A shotgun wedding to an opinion.

"And you want speculation in food to be regulated to stop hunger?" said she.

Bit simplistic, lady, but however, "I do."

"Thank you. At this point I do have to let you know we regulate financial services provided in the UK, but that's all we do. We don't make any decisions about the sorts of issues you are raising."

"Oh well, yes, but I hope you will regulate Goldman Sachs," I said, running short on well-informed, prepared utterances.

"That sort of thing is all decided by the Parliament," she said.

"I get that, but hopefully when you're all sitting round with your managers and they go, ‘What have people been calling about this month?' you'll go, 'They want to see food speculation regulated,' and so it will get back to the ministry that way."

"Uh-huh. And is there anything else I can help you with today?"

There was not.

I also tried to make sense of chocolate economics one night at work, after the next day's paper had been safely tucked into the press.

One of the three Peters mentioned he had found an American brand to be particularly junky.

"It's amazing they're even allowed to call it chocolate," he said. "It's mostly sugar and, bah, God knows what."

I took this as a chance to ask wiser people than myself how market capitalism worked.

If profits had to increase every year, was it just inevitable that the major chocolate companies would forever be degrading their product by increments, adding cheap fillers (palm oil, sugar) to save money?

"They can also reduce the size of the bars," one of the subeditors said. "The only other option is to invade a new planet to sell the product there, because all markets on this one are already full of chocolate."

All markets? I wondered vaguely about the recent easing of the trade embargo in the Middle East to allow chocolate into Palestine, but that thought was interrupted by George Orwell.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the quality of chocolate has declined to the point where it "normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire".

I wondered aloud whether the free market was just a form of totalitarianism. This was met by shrugs.