I found this story very inspiring. A decision made by one man changed the lives of so many people. And the chocolate is very good. If you haven't already, indulge yourself in some Green and Black's it will taste even better now that you know this! OK Ciariad!!
Green & Black's Maya Gold, the first British Fairtrade product, is more than an organic chocolate bar - it's the livelihood for a whole district of Belize. But with demand outstripping supply, could a newly discovered 19th-century cacao plantation be the answer?
It is, quite literally, the poor man's Green & Black's - organic cacao from the forests of Belize, fermented, dried, roasted on a comal (a circular iron hot plate over a wood fire), shelled, then ground by hand in a machine similar to a household mincer.
'It's half a day's work,' says Cyrila Cho, the stout, broad-faced woman who has welcomed me into her home in San Felipe to see how brigadeiros are made. She warms the cacao with condensed milk, adding allspice, black pepper and tzibik (wild vanilla) plucked from a vine at the top of a tree by her 21-year-old daughter Anna-Marie.
When the mixture has cooled, Cyrila rolls it by hand into a large ball, and from this she fashions smaller balls the size of truffle chocolates. 'We sell them to hotels,' her daughter explains, 'and every day my little brother takes them to the school. The children love it.' A packet of eight costs one Belize dollar (about 28p), supplementing the family's income from their 30-acre farm, where the five of them (eight before three older children left home) grow corn, rice, cho-cho (ground foods), coffee, coconut and oranges, as well as the cacao from which the brigadeiros are made.
Mind you, spiced cacao is nothing new in the Toledo district of southern Belize. It goes back hundreds of years to the time of the ancient Maya, whose civilisation began around 2000BC and peaked in AD900. Kukuh, a cacao drink traditionally flavoured with ground black pepper, chilli and spices, and sweetened with forest honey, was consumed hot or cold by the Maya to give them strength.
Inside Cyrila Cho's kitchen (a shack, albeit with a gas cooker and a single low-energy lightbulb), I notice her distinctive Amerindian features, her wide face and sturdy physique reminiscent of a Maori or a Pacific islander, and pick up on her guttural Kekchi language. Compared to people I have met elsewhere in Central America, she speaks little Spanish and has few Hispanic traits. Like two-thirds of the population in this remote, humid, malarial district near the border with Guatemala, Cyrila is a living, breathing, kukuh-drinking, modern-day Maya Indian.
Suddenly, it occurs to me that Maya Gold - the name given by Green & Black's to its orange-and-spice chocolate bar, made with beans grown by Cyrila Cho and the other 940 members of the Toledo Cacao Growers' Association (TCGA) - is more than just a slick marketing gimmick alluding to a semi-mythical past. It may evoke images of ruined temples, ancient peoples and lost civilisations, but the name is also rooted in the here and now, a tribute to the Maya who produce cacao today.
On our bone-crunching drive along unmetalled roads from Punta Gorda, on the Caribbean coast, to San Antonio, high in lushly forested mountains, there is further evidence of the Maya legacy. All the farmers we meet share the same half-dozen surnames: Teck, Peck, Bol and three variations on a theme (Cho, Choc and Choco) that seem so improbably apt for cacao farmers that I almost laugh.
These names point to a common heritage yet the Maya - spread throughout the region, from the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico to Honduras - have struggled to find a unified voice. Now, they have a Maya-language radio station in Toledo, where their numbers are concentrated. What they also share is a connection with the soil, the seasons and farming that marks them out as Maya - once the world's most advanced horticulturalists. Not only did they cultivate crops from wild plants (among them corn, tomatoes and capsicums) but cacao, cloned from a wild relative, was first fermented and traded here in southern Belize, the backbone of the Maya economy.
It was this heritage that impressed Craig Sams, the founder of Green & Black's, when he contacted the TCGA in 1993 to strike a deal with the Maya. In 1991, his Whole Earth company had launched a chocolate bar made with organic beans from Togo, West Africa. Two years later, a military coup sent him scurrying to find an alternative supplier. He ended up in Belize, where a combination of traditional farming practices (which today would be called organic) and crippling poverty meant most farmers had never used agrochemicals, preserving the organic integrity of the soil. The TCGA, then an association of 170 small growers owned and controlled by its members, had recently been plunged into crisis by tumbling market prices.
The stage was set for the birth of Maya Gold - a new chocolate bar, made with organic cacao from Belize, sold under the Green & Black's label. What Craig Sams offered the farmers was a five-year rolling contract, training in management and accountancy, help with Soil Association certification, a sizeable cash advance, plus a fixed price of Belize$1.25 per pound when the market price was only 55 cents.
The deal was accepted and, in 1994, Maya Gold was awarded the Fairtrade mark - the first British product to carry it. To this day, Green & Black's buys all the organic cacao produced in the Toledo district, paying the farmers a minimum price of US$1,600 (£900) per metric tonne, a Fairtrade premium of US$150 a tonne to be invested in social projects, and an organic premium of US$200 a tonne to cover the costs of Soil Association certification. It also funds 27 extension officers, local people trained in agronomy, nursery management, IT and administration. According to Gregor Hargrove, Green & Black's Canadian project manager, 92 cents of every dollar the farmers earn goes to their families - 'the highest return for any agricultural product'.
These days, 70 per cent of children in the outlying Maya villages benefit from secondary education in Punta Gorda, compared to 10 per cent before Green & Black's. Women, who are expert at fermenting and drying beans, have been empowered; villagers who used to live in rudimentary huts now have wooden bungalows with concrete floors; and the Maya - who comprise many, but not all, of the TCGA's members - find themselves with a new status and a new voice.
If you want to read the full story (ther's quite a lot more) see
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1781908,00.html
No comments:
Post a Comment