Last January, a thickly accented voice recorded itself on my office answering machine. Intrigued, I returned the call; the voice’s owner, a Dr. Pedro de Mesones, on hearing that my background was in food science and chocolate, wasted no time to invite me on a week-long excursion in Lam-bayeque Province, in Northern Peru.

In March, I joined a group of city-and-re-gional plan-ners and architects in Lima, and we flew north. As the sole "foodie," I was supposed to develop an agricultural plan for Pedro’s home village, Ferreñafé.

Not particularly suited to such a monumental task, I proposed instead to develop a box of chocolates that could be produced there and marketed in gourmet stores. I did this, and Pedro was very pleased with the appearance and flavor of the chocolate assortment. But that’s as far as the project went, and I have not heard from him since.

Despite this non-starter, I remained convinced that chocolates could be developed to represent place and that their sales in developed countries could be used to help keep capital in the countries. Currently, most eveloping countries of the third world ship a great deal of raw materials to the first world rather than shipping finished product.

This unbalanced situation is main- tained through high tariffs that discrimi- nate against finished products by slapping a hefty duty on them. Furthermore, the disparity is cultivated by multinational corporations, which encourage developing countries to keep cutting down rainforest and plant more raw material, creating a supply glut that lowers the price -- good for the corporation but not for the farmer.

Tired of reading the same bad news over and over, many social activists have taken to selling Fair Trade products in general. www.Equalexchange.org, www.Globalexchange.org, and SERRV are three ATOs, or Alternative Trade Organizations, from which one can buy products made in developing countries. The campaign for coffee has yielded results: in the future, Dunkin Donuts will serve only Fair Trade coffee and Procter and Gamble has announced a line of it.

Starbucks stubbornly refuses to brew it, although you can buy the beans.

The chocolate campaign has not come quite as far. M&M/Mars and other big chocolate players have so far not responded to a campaign mounted by www.globalexchange.com.

Two Fair Trade chocolates that are currently available are the Divine bar, manufactured by the Day Chocolate Company in Great Britain (divinechocolate.com) and the Art Bar, sold by Ithaca Fine Chocolates (ithacafinechocolates.com.)

Before getting that phone call from Dr. Pedro, I had arranged to travel to Ghana but had postponed the trip. In May, I reconnected with my Ghanaian contacts and arranged to travel to Accra on August 26.

Why Ghana?

Three reasons. I wanted to visit West Africa in order to taste the food that is at the heart of Soul Food and by extension Southern Cooking; I teach a Food and Culture course at Cal Poly. I also wanted to learn about the chocolate business since I run a chocolate enterprise project (Cal Poly Chocolates), and such a trip would greatly deepen my understand- ings. Finally, I still believed in the possibility of Fair Trade chocolate helping the third world.

While planning my trip, visited kuapakokoo.com, the website of a cocoa farm- ers’ cooperative that boasts 40,000 members. I also purchased Harvest of Hope by Phil Grout, a charming photo-essay about the life of a Kuapa Kokoo cocoa-farm- ing family (available through globalexchange.com.) And I arranged to visit the coopera- tive.

Incidentally, Kuapa Kokoo means "good cocoa farmer." I left on August 26, flew to Amsterdam and then to Accra where I spent two days visiting a few standard tourist sites: the National Museum, Nkrumah’s Mau- soleum, the Cape Coast fort from which one portion of the slave trade was conducted, and Kakum National Park, a semi- virgin expanse of rainforest. On the third day, I took a state bus from Accra to Kumasi. There, I spent four days in the company of Nicholas Agyei Gyan, the Research and Development Director of Kuapa Kokoo.

During our time together, Nicholas and I visited a number of villages, where I photographed the trappings of the cocoa business: weighing scales, sieves, tarpaulins covered with drying beans, and bamboo mats covered with slimy fermented beans.

I also interviewed officials in the society and cocoa farmers. And I visited some of the public works of the society such as the new wells and toilets they have purchased for the farmers.

I returned to Accra where I visited the Cocoa Processing Company and made contact with the GM of Confectionery. And one day, I took a tro-tro, a small, smoky van stuffed with people, to the Cocoa Research Institute in Tafo, where I saw some of the ex- periments in cocoa horticul- ture and processing of beans.

Back in the States, where the problems of the developing world seem dis- tant, one is tempted to put social concerns on the back burner. Resisting this temptation, I have developed an assortment of chocolates, each garnished with its own uniquely Ghanaian symbol. The milk chocolates are filled with peanut butter and a dark chocolate wafer — American to the taste, but Ghanaian in ingredients. The dark chocolates are filled with coconut macaroon; likewise, American in flavors but Ghanaian in ingredients.

On Monday, November 17 at 7:30 PM in the Unitarian Church, I will be presenting a slide show of my experiences in Ghana, as well as giving out free samples of this new chocolate assortment. This event is being sponsored by the church’s social justice committee. Come hear more details!