Emma Haziza returns every Saturday to a news item around the climate, the environment, and offers solutions. Saturday, February 11, Valentine’s Day which hides a real disaster, both ecological and human.
At Valentine’s Day, our better half is waiting for that little attention that will make us blush and make us happy. But behind all the flagship gifts, we discover that there are much less glamorous things hidden.
Chocolates, these little hearts that make us melt, are the fruit of intensive cocoa cultivation. It is the leading cause of deforestation in West Africa, which concentrates three-quarters of world production. Behind our chocolate tiles hide the mass extinction of our elephants, hippopotamuses, pangolins, leopards…
Deforestation, exploitation of children…
But where does chocolate come from? Cocoa seeds come from cocoa trees, these small shrubs that grow in tropical environments. In order to meet global and European demand, we have no choice but to wipe tropical forests off the map and plant these small trees there. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are the most affected by this deforestation: in Côte d’Ivoire, we are talking about 93% of forests wiped off the map of seven of the country’s 22 protected areas.
Behind our chocolates, nearly two million children are exploited in this intensive cocoa farming, while the average salary in Côte d’Ivoire is 46 centimes a day. In addition, there is an impact on the water cycle. If we remove forests, we completely disrupt the water cycle, we also need to massively extract water from groundwater. Our forests are also a way to capture carbon, so we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
Can we offer roses? On February 14, we won’t find roses near us. They are then imported either from Africa or from the Netherlands thanks to their greenhouses which make it possible to make flowers in intensive agriculture. They arrive by plane from Kenya, wrapped in cellophane… Not to mention dry lakes, phytosanitary products and pesticides which would make it more dangerous to smell a rose than to put your head behind an exhaust pipe.
Ethical gold, dried flowers, organic cotton…
What solutions? Choose chocolates rather made by great chocolate makers, from protected productions. But also ethical gold, with organic cotton, organic cosmetics without solidarity waste, boxes for gardening, good organic vegan wine, or even dried flowers…
And then the solutions that there do not require a lot of consumption: dimmed light, small meal with local products made with love, a romantic activity… We will have to ask ourselves questions about our consumption patterns, and it’s still always interesting to know what is behind these events.