In a report published Thursday (May 11) Oxfam said earnings for US companies Hershey, Mars and Mondelez in addition to Italy’s Ferrero and Swiss peers Lindt & Spruengli and Nestle had increased since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, a period when inflation has skyrocketed. The world’s four largest public chocolate corporations [Editor’s Note: Hershey, Lindt, Mondelēz and Nestlé] together made nearly $15 billion in profits from their confectionary divisions alone since the pandemic broke. THis amount was up by an average 16 percent since 2020. The giants paid out on average more than their total net profits (113 percent) to shareholders between 2020 and 2022.
At the same time, an Oxfam survey of more than 400 cocoa farmers in Ghana – the second-largest global producer of the commodity – found their net incomes had fallen by an average of 16 percent since the same period.
For women, the average drop was 22 percent, it added.[…]
The charity claimed that up to 90 percent of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income, “meaning they cannot afford enough food or other basics such as clothing, housing and medical care. Adding that "many of the 800,000 farmers in the country survive on just $2 a day.”
The NGO also noted that while Ghana produces about 15% of the world’s beans, it receives only about 1.5% of the sector’s estimated $130 billion annual global earnings. We ‘do everything we can to help’[…]
Oxfam’s Behar added on Thursday that chocolate giants needed “to put their money where their mouth is”.
“They must rid themselves of their colonial legacy of extracting raw materials and keeping farmers in poverty while making astronomical profits for their rich shareholders,” he added.
Even better is some of you are trying to disarm the two trans people so the 85 illiterate neo Nazis who have guns can more easily chop us up and throw our bodies into wood chippers
Travel opportunities within the ancient Greek world largely depended on status and profession; nevertheless, a significant proportion of the population could, and did, travel across the Mediterranean to sell their wares, skills, go on religious pilgrimage, see sporting events or even travel simply for the pleasure of seeing the magnificent sights of the ancient world. Travel was not always glamorous, though, and three other significant groups who also travelled far from their homeland, usually against their will, were political envoys, slaves, and soldiers, especially mercenaries.
ALT
