Word: cocoa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bitter Sugar. Hit hardest are the producers of cocoa, which dropped 45% this year to a postwar low of 120 a Ib. in mid-July, and has rebounded only 10 since then. Brazil, Cameroon, Togo and the Ivory Coast have been hurt, and Nigeria is paying its cocoa growers partly with promissory notes instead of money. Worst battered is Ghana, where cocoa produces 60% of the national income. Because of the price drop and Dictator Kwame Nkrumah's overly ambitious development schemes, the country is struggling with the severest economic crisis in its eight-year history. Factories in Accra...
...situation is almost as bitter for sugar, whose market has been swamped by an unexpected increase in the Cuban crop. The price is off even more than cocoa's-to a 100-year low of 20 a Ib., 60% less than a year ago. Fourteen Latin American nations feel the pinch. Efforts to revive the paralyzed economy of the Dominican Republic are hampered by the fact that sugar is its No. 1 crop-responsible for more than 50% of its earnings in world trade...
...glide up? The main reason is that commodity supplies are largely unpredictable, depend chiefly on the weather. International marketing agreements that could bring stability have been hard to negotiate and harder still to enforce. Castro upset the world sugar pact; the world coffee agreement is riddled with holes, and cocoa producers have repeatedly failed to agree on quotas and prices...
Britain's powerful bankers have no control over the factors that caused this decline: a 22% drop in the price of Australia's wool, a 33% plunge in the price of Ghana's cocoa, a surge in India's food imports. Ironically, the sterling area's ailments have been aggravated by Britain's attempts to buttress the pound and by the U.S.'s program to end its own payments deficit. Because of the cutback in U.S. and British loans and investment, Australia's reserves fell from $2 billion in January...
...thousands of colonists, and with them came vast numbers of Negro slaves from Africa. The French called their Caribbean possession Saint Domingue, termed it the "Queen of the Antilles." So it was. In the 1780s, its foreign trade approached $140 million a year, with vast profits from sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton and indigo flowing back home. Before long, 40,000 whites were lording it over 450,000 blacks. Then one night in August 1791, the island's painfully oppressed slaves rose in bloody revolt. Armed with pitchforks, torches and machetes and chanting voodoo dirges, they massacred 2,000 French...