For a plethora of reasons, market forces alone -- boiled down to 'cheap commodity fodder for cheap candy filler' -- fail to provide a decent livelihood for harvesters & their families on the ground. So aid agencies step in to pick up the shortfall. Cacáo bromans (tree-tenders): the beloved but abused orphans of chocolate.

What can happen in these scenarios is that the cash crop for export -- in this case cocoa, almost none of which any growers eat themselves -- comes to dominate the landholdings at the expense of other plants which they grew for sustenance / food to put on their own table. They use the profits derived from the cash crop to buy consumer goods in a rush of luxury fever (cell phones, TVs, tablets, etc.), plus foodstuffs (perhaps now imported thanks to the globalism) they now pay for with the cash earned from the cocoa, leaving them vulnerable to speculators who, for instance, drove up the price of rice a couple seasons ago.

Just part & parcel of a convoluted web ensnaring those caught in the middle of int'l trade, low interest rates & high food prices.

Some believe this continues a downward spiral into deeper poverty: hunger (farmers too busy feeding the export trade ironically can no longer feed themselves), debt (eventually loan sharks called lending institutions appear on the scene with credit advances, futures contracts, + more financial instruments) &, finally, dependency (call in the aid brigades... IMF / WB specialists to mandate austerity programs on one hand while spawning friendly "progressive" groups like World Development Movement on another... before starting the whole cycle all over again since a new crop of suckers is born every generation).

The intentions behind this system might be altruistic. And at least victims now have the internet as an outlet to vent their frustrations by raging against the New World Order / 1 World Governance on their Kickstarter fundraising campaign that simultaneously perpetuate & appease the situation.

The luckiest ones will be able to watch themselves -- Bin Laden-style -- on late-night TV airing commercial spots opposite evangelicals, beseeching viewers to txt donations now for starving cocoa farmers so that people in the "First World" of Crumbling Infrastructure can eat chocolate in yet another ploy by the disadvantaged to game the system as much as those who devise it.

Will it always be this way? As long as consumers refuse to pay the real cost for the goods they put in their mouths because that's, after all, where their money's at.

One way or another, we all pay for it. Consider oil. Gas pumps across the USA average around $4/gallon but when factoring in the military expenditures to secure the supply lines & shipping lanes, plus all the baksheesh / bribes involved around the horn, the true price paid by taxpayers amounts close to double the advertised rate (YMMV).

Ahhh, but we just gotta have it... so let's escape back into the world's favorite flavor: here's a bar that sets out to help forget all those head-scratching woes only to end up a head-banging confabulation of them.