Word: cocoa
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Grown each year on the Gold Coast of Western Africa are enough beans for half the world's supply of cocoa-270,000 tons. The cocoa farms are run by native tribesmen, black as a tinker's pot and quick to catch on about the law of supply and demand. In 1930 it occurred to them to do something about prices. Cocoa was so low on world markets that working on the farm didn't seem worth their while. In a few months much West African cocoa land was jungle again, and the price of cocoa went...
...same thing happened to cocoa that happened to all commodities. Last September the last of the 1936-37 crop was selling for 6½?. Then rumors began to arrive with the rats on the ships from the Gold Coast. The natives were going to hold up the new crop, which was due to hit the market on the first of October. A few months later the rumors sharpened: the natives were burning their cocoa...
Accurate Gold Coast figures have always been as hard to find as Dr. Livingstone. How much cocoa was being burned, no one knew, not even Mr. Winfried Musa Tete-Ansa, managing director of the Gold Coast and Ashanti Farmers Union, who last week was in Manhattan and available for questioning. Guesses ran from 500 tons to 5,000. Mr. Tete-Ansa himself has advised his farmers to burn "at least 40,000 tons." Last week the price was down to 6? a pound. Whether or not great quantities had been burned since October, only 44,000 tons of Gold Coast...
...Tete-Ansa, a Gold Coast prince who is considerably blacker (see cut) than his country's cocoa, is inclined to blame it on the British. "One day in 1916 I had a vision," he says. "I decided to give up being a prince and become a businessman." He handed over his social duties to a younger cousin, and devoted his time to the flea he had in his ear about the British...
...action of a great number. Commodity Corp. uses the same procedure, but instead of buying stocks and bonds, it buys actual commodities or commodity future contracts. On December 31, 35% of its portfolio was in the warehouse, 65% in futures. It had future contracts to buy or sell in cocoa, copper, corn, cotton, hides, oats, rubber, sugar, wheat, wool and pepper. In the warehouse it held cocoa (179,482 lb.), lead (659,836 lb.), pepper (785,600 lb.), rubber (67,036 lb.), sugar (1,344,000 lb.), wool (51,751 lb.) and zinc (120,046 lb.). An investor who held...