World Chocolate Supply Nearly Exhausted
99% of
Raw Chocolate Has Already Been Mined, Experts Warn
By Ruth Hershey
World Press Syndicate
Glubenville, VA-- One hundred and seventy Virginia chocolate miners won't be returning to their jobs tomorrow because their employer, Migrus Confections Group, believes the men have removed nearly all the raw chocolate that can be practically extracted from their site. The closing of the Glubenville mine marks the tenth chocolate mine closing in the state of Virginia and the fifty eighth shutdown of a raw chocolate extraction operation in the United States. According to the World Council on Desserts and Sweets (WCDS), over three hundred chocolate mines worldwide have been forced to cease operations in the past decade.
"This is a global problem and it ain't going away," said Rich Brown, 52, a chocolate miner who has spent over thirty years working chocolate mines in both the Eastern U.S. and Central America. "I could probably get work overseas, maybe in the Austrian or Swedish chocolate mines, but even those are pretty much tapped. Most people in this business are looking to get out. The way I see it, we've got three more years of chocolate left in this world to enjoy--if we're lucky. It's high time I quit mining it and got busy eating it."
While experts are reluctant to speculate on the exact time frame, they all agree that the end of chocolate is indeed in sight.
"The price of chocolate has already begun to rise," said Mamimbe Koko, WCDS president. "That trend will continue as the last remaining chocolate mines scratch out the dregs of their capacities. We expect Europe's mines to yield the world's last chocolate, perhaps within five years. Our mines in Kenya are already nearly barren."
News of the critical chocolate shortage has caught the attention and imagination of the scientific community. Several foods research firms are now known to be scrambling to devise the formula that can best replace chocolate once it becomes prohibitively scarce.
Veteran chocolate miner Rich Brown displays what he believes will be the
last nugget of raw chocolate extracted from the Glubenville mine.
Graph illustrating how the nearly steady decline in estimated chocolate reserves leads to the practical extinction of the tasty commodity in the near future.
"It's a tall order," says Clark Barr, founder of KLV Tastes Inc., a company that holds patents on over twenty popular synthetic flavors. "Chocolate has a certain kind of magic. You can come close to artificially replicating the flavor, but duplicating that buzz you get from good chocolate, well that's a whole 'nother thing. Chocolate is special. I'm gonna miss it when it's gone."
Perhaps nobody will miss chocolate more than
the members of Chocoholics Anonymous, a society dedicated to the enjoyment
of all forms of the food. "Chocolate is like love or puppies,"
says Myra Thicke, president of the association. "There is no substitute for
it, and many of us wonder, quite literally, if we can live without it. I can only hope and
pray that our space scientists will recognize how critical chocolate
really is to the quality of life for humankind and dedicate their
resources to seeking out chocolate reserves on other planets. Who knows,
someday I might be able to enjoy a Mars Bar that actually came from Mars!"
News about the imminent disappearance of chocolate has caused wild volatility in the stock prices of companies heavily dependent on the commodity. Nestle stock, for instance, fell nearly twenty points yesterday in what has been months of up and down numbers for the company. Oddly, the harbingers of chocolate's end seem to have had a positive effect on certain companies not directly linked to chocolate such as Sterling Drug. Sterling stock has quadrupled in value in the past three weeks. The company manufactures the popular over-the-counter remedy Midol.
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