Ahead of the Easter weekend, multiple media outlets reported that chocolate prices are soaring, and according to the coverage, the main culprit driving the inflating costs is climate change.
Across multiple platforms, the reports followed a similar message, using similar language to describe the problem and its causes — and the reports all came out the same week.
“Easter egg prices soar as cocoa crops are hit by climate crisis and exploitation,” the Guardian reported on Good Friday. The article blames the shortage of cocoa, which is used to make chocolate, on rising prices of fertilizers, deforestation, illegal mining practices and “extreme weather events.”
The article doesn’t provide any details on these alleged events, but it does mention El Niño, which is a warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It causes changes in weather patterns during the cycle. This cycle was recorded long before carbon dioxide emissions were a factor in the atmosphere.
An National Public Radio segment, which also ran on Good Friday, interviewed its business correspondent, who said “farmers there [in the Ivory Coast and Ghana] have been facing extreme weather, changing climate patterns, which have just decimated crop harvests.” NPR provided no data or sourcing for the environmental claims.
Writing in The Conversation, reporter Jack Marley’s headline suggests that climate change “may” be the culprit, and he then goes on to write that “food production globally is facing an increasingly hostile climate.”
Hellbound and Down 