In an article ahead of Valentine's Day headlined  Valentine’s Day Chocolate Will Cost More This Year, as Cocoa Prices Rise (possibly paywalled), reporter Stephanie Storm writes:

"Criollo is also less susceptible to the diseases that strike the main type of cocoa, Forastero, which makes up about 85 percent of the world’s supply. The Trinitario variety, grown primarily in Latin America and Southeast Asia, ends up in high-end dark chocolate and is roughly 12 percent of the world’s cocoa."

Anybody who knows anything about cocoa knows that criollos are more susceptible to diseases than Forasteros are and that they produce significantly less than Forastero and Trinitario varieties.

And then Ms Storm quotes:

“The supply chain in West Africa is at the heart of the price problem,” Mr. Rollet [ed note: Mr Rollet is a co-founder of Alter Eco and serves as co-CEO] said. “Farmers are at the bottom of the chain, and they’re not getting any richer, thus they don’t see a future in cocoa,” he said. “So farmers there are planting rubber trees instead of cocoa trees.”

It's fair to say that this is a gross over-simplification of "the heart of the problem."

So - apart from spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) and not revealing more about the true heart of the problem - what's the real value of an article like this? One written from what appears to be a position of a near-total lack of understanding of the cocoa and chocolate markets?

Perhaps Ms Storm might benefit from reading this post from the very early days of TheChocolateLife.

Your thoughts?

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clay - http://www.thechocolatelife.com/clay/

updated by @clay: 04/09/15 11:14:48