Washington: Chocolate makers have recently revealed that the world is running out of chocolate amid dwindling cocoa supplies.
Mars, Inc. and Swiss-based chocolate giant Barry Callebaut stated that people are consuming more cocoa than farmers are able to produce.
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 reach 1 million metric tons and could exceed an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future.
70% of the world’s cocoa is produced in the Ivory Cost and Ghana. But disease, drought and farmers opting to grow more productive crops such as corn and rubber have made growing conditions less than ideal.
John Mason of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council told the Independent that in 20 years, chocolate will be rare and expensive like caviar and the average people won’t be able to afford it.
However, farmers in Costa Rica are working on several a new disease-resistant breeds of cocoa.