It might be time to start hoarding marked-down bags of Halloween candy: two of the world’s leading chocolate makers – Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut – say we’re in the midst of a chocolate shortage.
According to The Washington Post:
Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.
The newspaper lays out a few different causes for the cocoa deficit
effect, including decreased production due to dry weather in West Africa
(producers of over 70% of the world’s cocoa), the increased popularity
of dark chocolate (flavonoids, yo) and the rising cost of cocoa.
An African agricultural research group is scrambling to come up with a
solution, but it may alter the taste of the sweet stuff. In the
meantime, we’ll be lining our underground bunkers with Hershey’s bars.
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