Burnt Cocoa

Grown each year on the Gold Coast of Western Africa are enough beans for half the world's supply of cocoa--270,000 tons. The cocoa farms are run by native tribesmen, black as a tinker's pot and quick to catch on about the law of supply and demand. In 1930 it occurred to them to do something about prices. Cocoa was so low on world markets that working on the farm didn't seem worth their while. In a few months much West African cocoa land was jungle again, and the price of cocoa went up. In 1936 there was slightly less rain than usual in the rainy season--what, for Equatorial Africa, amounted to a drought. Cocoa went up again. The natives, reflecting on the simplicity of economics, easily perceived that the less cocoa went to market, the higher went its price. For one wild day last year the spot price on the New York Cocoa Exchange was 13-c- a pound.

But the same thing happened to cocoa that happened to all commodities. Last September the last of the 1936-37 crop was selling for 6 1/2-c-. Then rumors began to arrive with the rats on the ships from the Gold Coast. The natives were going to hold up the new crop, which was due to hit the market on the first of October. A few months later the rumors sharpened: the natives were burning their cocoa.

Accurate Gold Coast figures have always been as hard to find as Dr. Livingstone. How much cocoa was being burned, no one knew, not even Mr. Winfried Musa Tete-Ansa, managing director of the Gold Coast and Ashanti Farmers Union, who last week was in Manhattan and available for questioning. Guesses ran from 500 tons to 5,000. Mr. Tete-Ansa himself has advised his farmers to burn "at least 40,000 tons." Last week the price was down to 6-c- a pound. Whether or not great quantities had been burned since October, only 44,000 tons of Gold Coast cocoa reached the market. In the same five months last year the figure was 176,000. What witch-doctors, the natives wondered, were keeping the price from going up?

Mr. Tete-Ansa, a Gold Coast prince who is considerably blacker (see cut) than his country's cocoa, is inclined to blame it on the British. "One day in 1916 I had a vision," he says. "I decided to give up being a prince and become a businessman." He handed over his social duties to a younger cousin, and devoted his time to the flea he had in his ear about the British.

Last year he set up in England a Gold Coast and Ashanti trading company for direct trade with the Gold Coast, went to Manhattan to set up another trading company, and when he is done he will set up a third in Holland. Meanwhile, supervision of the cocoa burning is left to an organization with the name of the Gold Coast and Nigeria Hold-Up Committee.

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