Hershey's chocolates are not all that sweet for west African cocoa growers

The governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana have accused Hershey of maneuvering to circumvent premiums tacked on to the price of cocoa futures in order to raise incomes for hard-pressed cocoa farmers

In the sweet world of chocolate, it’s seen as a club wielded by the OPEC of confections -- a tool of a faraway cartel that artificially inflates the price of precious cocoa.

In Ivory Coast and Ghana, where most of the world’s cocoa is actually grown, it is viewed as something else entirely: a lifeline for farmers and entire economies held hostage to the vagaries of world commodities markets.

Now those competing viewpoints -- globalisation reduced to a chocolate bar -- have collided in spectacular fashion and thrust the normally secretive machinations of some of the world’s biggest chocolate companies, cocoa