'The Chocolate Islands'

Image courtesy of Paxgaea

Across São Tomé dense cocoa plantations cling to the sides of monolithic pillars. A third of the archipelago is covered in the crop which makes up 80% of its exports. In the late 1990s, dips in production and prices left the island state heavily reliant on foreign aid and farmers on the poverty line. But since 2004 farmers have set up collectives, eliminating the middlemen who had been eating into their profits. With facilities to ferment the product and dry the cocoa to export they are benefitting from prices five times higher than those for cocoa seeds still in their treacly translucent liquid. São Tomé and Príncipe does not produce huge quantities of cocoa but what it does grow is organic and Fairtrade which goes down well with wealthy Western consumers.