Chocolate Inflation; The Consumer Class; French Roads and a Canadian Prime Minister
March 4, 2024 Volume 4 # 42
Chocolate Is Going to Get a Lot Pricier
The reason is mainly because of devastating weather in two Countries: Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Both produce two thirds of the world’s cocoa beans, the stuff of which chocolate is made. As you can see, not many countries can take up the slack.
Cocoa beans, the stuff used to make chocolate bars and chocolate bunnies, are grown on small farms, mostly in West Africa. The farmers are far from rich; most live close to the poverty line and many use children to farm the stuff that makes chocolate.
Who Knew There was a `Consumer Class’
And while 100-million people will join the Consumer Class in 2024, mostly from poorer countries, the consumer class is shrining, mostly in richer countries where the birth rate is low. Or in middle ranked countries like Bulgaria where people are leaving for richer parts of the EU. It only takes spending of $12 a day to join the consumer class. There are poor countries where people only earn a few dollars a day.
Abandoned McMansions in China
The Chinese love converting money into real estate. Developers in China have overbuilt to meet demand. These abandoned houses have reverted to farmland.
These houses “The State Guest Mansions” are in Shenyang, about 400 miles northeast of Beijing. This from AFP, Agence France Presse. Perhaps the most shocking photo is the one below, cattle grazing where China’s new rich were meant to live.
Where the phrase Shi…y Roads Is The Truth
A friend who lives part time in southwestern France had to re-route her travel as farmers spread manure on the road and blocked a toll booth with round hay bales.
Blocage de l’A62 : à Castelsarrasin, l’un des derniers bastions de la résistance agricole
Read the headline in the local paper: it translates to: Blockage of the A62: in Castelsarrasin, one of the last bastions of agricultural resistance.
The red dot on the map of France is where the `blocage’ took place.
Who Makes the Planes You Fly In
Boeing is less than $2-billion ahead of Airbus. After the calamitous event with the Boeing 737 Max 9, you wonder how long that lead will last. CNN carrying a story of how some nervous passengers are refusing to fly on a plane where an emergency exit door blew out in mid flight.
San Francisco is Some Crowded
According to this chart, it is the most second most densely populated city in North America after New York, and that includes Mexico City. Canada’s population is now 40-million and Montreal is in fact more densely populated than Toronto with 4,517 people per square kilometre.
World Wide Web of 1902
It might seem like a long time ago, but in 1902 all four of my grandparents were alive; one living in Montreal, another in Coteau, Quebec, and two in South Shields in northeast England.
How High’s the Water Mama
A house in Floria where the Atlantic ocean almost took out the pool and the house.
And Florida isn’t even on the list of places the tide is high. Only Houston in the USA is on the danger list.
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Lionized at Home; Not So Much Abroad
Brian Mulroney died this week. The Globe and Mail described him as Canada’s last great prime minister. Free trade, the Goods and Services Tax, the end of the Foreign Investment Review Board and the National Energy Policy. I agree.
Even Le Journal de Montreal, owned by the Quebec separatist Pierre-Karl Peladeau, loved him, at least in retrospect. Ten pages on a federalist politician.
The New York Times was particularly nasty, focusing on the negatives from the start and quoting from a payback book by the late Peter Newman. Newman was broke near the end of his life and did Mulroney a dirty by printing un-edited interviews.
But the NYT hammer job was nothing compared to The Daily Telegraph who saw him as selling out to Quebec. (Guess they missed the Journal de Montreal.)
Even the Toronto Star left out most of the nasty stuff. Ir ran a fine piece on how Brian Mulroney gave up drinking and inspired the Star’s writer to do the same.
Brian Mulroney’s Style
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I liked this picture in the Globe of Mulroney in his last day on office. He was always well dressed, in a suit or casually. What this picture shows is that many of his suits had just one button. Highly unusual. Mulroney could carry it off. He suits made at Russell’s in Montreal, and I learned about it when I had a few shirts made there.
Essay of the Week
This is a story I wrote for the Globe, almost 10 years ago.
Fiona Eberts combined the traditional role of a mother and wife of a successful man with a radical volunteer career in Africa helping educate some of the poorest women in the world. She was married for 44 years to the late Jake Eberts, the successful Canadian film producer, and the couple used their resources and influence for a number of causes.
In 2001 Ms. Eberts read about an African charity, Campaign for Female Education, Camfed. Its goal is to educate young women in rural Africa, since few of them went to school, that privilege reserved for their brothers. Ms. Eberts was living in Paris at the time and took the train to London then Cambridge to meet with Ann Cotton, the woman who founded Camfed in 1993.
“Soon Fiona was travelling with me to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia,” said Ms. Cotton from her home in Cambridge, England. “She was very adventurous. I remember travelling in southern Africa and our plane made an emergency landing. We didn’t know what country we were in. Fiona walked into a nearby building and was soon chatting with some local women and turned up with toasties for us to eat.”
The charity says it doesn’t expect to find instant solutions to rural poverty in Africa. Its objective is to find long term solutions and it sponsors mostly girls—though some boys – through primary and secondary school and in some cases university. They also teach women how to start and run their own small businesses and arrange grants and loans.
“Fiona was a great story teller and she taught me a lot about story telling,” said Ms. Cotton, who uses interesting stories about the work her charity is doing to raise money in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. “She saw stories everywhere.”
Ms. Eberts became chair of Camfed in 2004 and used connections to raise money and awareness for the charity. Her husband had been an early backer of Jeff Skoll, the founder of E Bay, and he soon became a major donor to the charity through his foundation.
“She had a generous and spontaneous heart that infused the way she lived,” said Ms. Cotton. “I remember we were in Tanzania talking to a woman whose granddaughter we were educating. She indicated she admired the colourful scarf Fiona was wearing and she took it off straight away and gave it to her.”
Ms. Eberts became involved in other projects in Africa, including helping start a plantation in north-eastern Ghana to grow Moringa. The project combined two of her interests: poverty in rural Africa and alternative medicine.
“She wanted to encourage independence for the women growing the plant and she believed it was nutritious and had medicinal qualities,” said her son Alexander Eberts. “The experience of working with Ann Cotton in Africa changed her life.”
Fiona Louise Leckie was born in Weybridge, a suburb of London, England, in October of 1946 soon after her parents returned from spending three and a half years in Japanese internment camps in Burma and China. Her father, John Leckie, worked for a British insurance company in Singapore and after the war started enlisted in the British army. He was captured when the Japanese overwhelmed British forces in southeast Asia in December of 1941. Her mother, Mary-Lou Newman, was captured in Singapore and interned in a camp in China.
After the war John wrote a letter to Mary-Lou proposing marriage and asking to meet him in Sydney, Australia. She managed to get there aboard one or more tramp steamers and they were married in late 1945. They returned to England where Fiona was born but were soon back in Asia.
Alexander Eberts remembers his grandparents were never bitter about their time in the Japanese internment camps. “They never had any animosity and I think that attitude percolated through to my mother,” said Mr. Eberts from the family home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where his parents spent several months every year.
Fiona Leckie spent her childhood in Hong Kong and Manila where her father worked. As a young girl she was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.
She was working in Brussels when friends set her up with a young Canadian banker, Jake Eberts. When he was offered a transfer to New York the firm said they would pay to bring his wife but not his girlfriend and the two married in 1968.
Mr. Eberts was working in finance, raising money through stock and bond issues, when he was approached to finance a movie about rabbits. The firm he was working for wasn’t interested, but said go ahead and try it on your own if you like. He did.
Watership Down was a huge success and Mr. Eberts soon founded a production company, Goldcrest Films with backing from the Pearson Group, the British firm that owns part of The Economist among other things. He went to produce about 50 films, which won 37 Oscars, including Gandhi, and Chariots of Fire.
Fiona Eberts never worked in the film business, though she had strong opinions on the value of her husband’s work, and was critical of Hollywood which made films for very young audiences.
“As a result there is so little to see or rent for so many of us,” she told the Montreal Gazette. She said her husband made films for grown ups that won awards and audiences.
Her main job was raising her family and running their busy household. Though the antithesis of the type, she jokingly referred to herself as a “poule de luxe”, the French expression for a spoiled woman. As the children grew older she expanded her volunteer work and wrote articles for publications such as the Daily Telegraph on subjects such as our her parents’ experiences in the Japanese camps and arranged marriages in India. Neither she nor her husband were ever Hollywood type people and never lived in Los Angeles. They split their time between Europe, North Hatley, Quebec, and Sundance, Utah.
One of Ms. Eberts’s great passions was alternative medicine. Though she ddin’t abandon traditional medicine in her personal life, she believed in things such as the medicinal benefits of the Moringa plant that she helped grow in Ghana. She joined the board of NFAIM, the National Foundation of Alternative and Integrated Medicine. Because of her interest in alternative medicine she was asked to speak at a Ted Women conference a few years ago.
“Her range of interests were well researched and her positions fiercely advocated,” said her brother-in-law, Tony Stikeman, who by coincidence was born on the same day as Fiona. “She had strong views on Iraq, for example, and saw Bush and Blair as war criminals.”
When her husband was diagnosed with a rare cancer she nursed him at home until his death in late 2012. She had recently moved back to Canada full time. While visiting friends she lay down on a coach and never woke up.
Fiona Eberts was born on October 30, 1946, in Weybridge, England. She died on July 20 2014, aged 67.