🔅 Your Chocolate Costs More, but Farmers Are Still Struggling
Plus, Egypt’s newest identity craze
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Pyramids, Not Pan-Africans: Egypt’s New Pharaon-ly Fans
Egypt’s newest identity craze, the “Children of Kemet,” wants to ditch Arab, Muslim and African labels and rewind the nation back to its pharaoh-only glory days. Born on Facebook and now splintered into pages like “Egyptian Not Arab,” the movement romanticizes ancient Kemet while blasting ties to the continent.
Why the appeal? With inflation soaring and authoritarianism tightening, many Egyptians find comfort in a neat, racially “pure” past, according to
.Critics warn that cherry-picking history fuels racism, fractures citizenship and mimics global far-right nostalgia. Yet the group has flexed real-world muscle: online pressure even torpedoed Kevin Hart and Travis Scott Egypt shows for being “Afrocentric.”
Amid economic pain and political crackdown, a shiny pharaonic dream offers a seductive escape… at the cost of Egypt’s richly layered history – and reality.
It makes for an interesting read, and you can find out more right here.
Cocoa Chaos: Why Your Chocolate Bar Costs More, but Ivorian Farmers Still Can’t Pay the Bills
Global cocoa prices have soared since 2023, yet growers in Ivory Coast (the source of about 40 percent of the world’s beans) are barely breaking even. In villages around Daloa, farmers like Kouadio N’Guessan Yves are still selling at the “bocha” price, a government-fixed farm-gate rate dating back to 1960.
Because the bocha is set months before harvest on the basis of forward contracts, it remains stuck far below spot prices in London and New York. With margins squeezed, most farmers can’t afford new seedlings, fertiliser, or even school fees for their children, so they nurse century-old trees whose yields decline year after year.
That under-investment collides with a growing wave of threats: Swollen-shoot virus and black-pod fungus have torn through plantations, while climate-change-driven heatwaves and erratic rains further sap productivity and hasten disease spread.
A handful of niche programmes try to plug the gap. Co-operatives such as Kapatchiva supply Tony’s Chocolonely, the Dutch brand that pays a “living income” premium and offers agronomy support. Yet these deals reach only a fraction of the country’s 1.2 million cocoa farmers, and the vast majority still earn less than the World Bank’s extreme-poverty threshold of three dollars a day. As long as overall farm incomes stay this low, growers cannot replant or protect their crops, perpetuating a cycle of ageing trees, flat yields and deeper poverty.
Meanwhile, producers outside West Africa are cashing in: Farmers in places like Ecuador, Nigeria and Peru enjoy the full benefit of record futures prices, because their governments allow farm-gate rates to float. And so the global chocolate industry now faces an uncomfortable truth: relying on two countries for two-thirds of its raw cocoa leaves it dangerously exposed. Until Ivory Coast and Ghana overhaul their pricing systems and reinvest meaningfully in their plantations, consumers can expect costlier chocolate bars while the world’s top cocoa growers continue to miss out on the windfall.
GERD Done: Ethiopia Flips the Switch, Egypt Reaches for the Tums
Add Africa’s biggest hydropower plant to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s résumé. After 13 years, $4 billion, and an untold number of regional ulcers, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is officially complete: 1.8 kilometres of concrete straddling the Blue Nile and standing 145 metres tall.
What Ethiopia gets
‣ A megawatt bonanza that could electrify the 60 percent of its people still living off-grid.
‣ A national symbol to rival injera and long-distance running.
‣ Bragging rights at September’s inauguration.
What upstream Egypt fears:
‣ A 2 percent drop in Nile flow which could presumably wipe out 200,000 acres of irrigated farmland.
‣ An upstream neighbour with the on-off switch to Cairo’s tap water.
What Sudan (also upstream) worries about:
‣ The same thirst-based anxiety as Egypt.
Abiy’s pitch: “Shared water, shared power, shared prosperity.” Reality check: previous trilateral talks have gone precisely nowhere. Still, the turbines were built and the reservoir is filling.
Food for Thought
“The way one speaks is the way one acts.”
— Uganda Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is from Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.