Anna Jones (Letters, 18 September) asks, “why can’t the chocolate be made in Africa?” The answer is simple: it can. In Ghana, at least, there is a perfectly good cocoa processing company that makes excellent chocolate – free from additives. They cannot export to the EU, because of the limitation that ex-colonies may only export “primary produce” tariff-free. Therefore the company makes chocolate for the local market; it’s a bit on the hard side, so that it can be kept in stores without air-conditioning, and Ghanaians do not think very much of it. If Anna Jones buys a bar of Fairtrade chocolate in this country, she will find on the back, in the small print, “made in Germany”. Maybe post-Brexit we can offer Ghana a better deal. Apart from the advantage of selling in to a more stable market, there would be the added ecological bonus in that chocolate bars require much less transportation space than the beans that make them. So it’s win-win all round.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge
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