El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), our planet’s single largest natural source of year-to-year variations in seasonal climate—has been disrupting climate in the tropics and beyond since May 2023, likely contributing to many months of record-high global ocean temperatures, extreme heat stress to coral reefs, drought in the Amazon and Central America, opposing wet and dry precipitation extremes in Africa, low ice cover on the Great Lakes, and record-setting atmospheric rivers on the U.S. West Coast. 

From: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/june-2024-update-la-nina-likely-late-summer

As I write this El Niño – Southern Oscillation has left Ghana and Ivory Coast with cocoa bean plantations mostly decimated, their  main processing factories having to close, with hopes they may recover by next season.

Their crops, having been through severe drought and flood, developed devastating swollen shoot disease, see

https://thecocoapost.com/major-ghana-cocoa-region-81-infected-with-bean-disease

This has impacted all chocolate producers around the world, causing the price of chocolate to double. In Germany, they are experimenting with syntheticaly made chocolate.

Rather than give up, Ghana has seized the opportunity to build their own chocolate production, using what beans they have:

https://ghanachocolatehub.com/niche-cocoa

They are beginning to create a demand for their own brand which is adding value to their skills in forming this company.

For those addicted to dark chocolate (I’m one of them!) I have had to do without as the price is just too high.

I realise that higher prices of many foods will now be something we cannot avoid by ‘shopping around’…..climate change is beginning to impact more and more of our daily lives and we have done nothing to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we just pretend we are doing something with marketing ‘transitional’ stages as if that really is a significant thing.

For example, see Ann Pettifor, Substack:

The Labour government in its manifesto promised to make “Britain a clean energy superpower” yet has agreed to invest £22 billion to ‘capture’ CO2 and extend the output, profits and dividends of global oil company shareholders – like Norwegian state-owned Equinor and Eni – for 25 years. A deal that by the way, has the support of the union of high paid oil rig workers.

From ‘Capitalism’s Attack on Time and Nature, why governments and big oil cannot face the future’, by Ann Pettifor, Substack, Oct 7th 2024