Baltimore Automaker Solutions, EU Farmer Protests, Cocoa Prices Go Up

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But after the devastating bridge collapse, most of it is now blocked.

NPR's Camilla Dominoski joins us.

Camilla, thanks so much for being with us.

A lot depends on how long the port stays mostly blocked.

That's going to determine what the workarounds are for companies and so what the impacts are.

Companies like Mazda and Mercedes, they say they're still looking at their options.

But we know this is harder for them than rerouting a container.

Baltimore is not a particularly big port when it comes to processing containers.

But like you mentioned, it's very significant for vehicle imports and exports.

Handled nearly 850,000 of them last year.

And it's not just volume.

It takes special ships to move these vehicles.

They're called roll-on, roll-off, or row-row vessels.

And not every port is capable of handling them.

And then once the vehicles come off the ship,

there is really important processing that has to happen.

This includes adding parts, installing accessories on the vehicles.

There's inspections.

There's paperwork that has to happen before a vehicle gets the window sticker.

And that happens at the port.

And if you can't do that, even if you've gotten them off the ship,

you wouldn't be able to sell the car.

What are the alternatives?

One is there is a part of the Baltimore port that is still open.

Right at the mouth of the harbor,

there's a terminal that Volkswagen and BMW use for their vehicles.

And that terminal has confirmed that they have a capacity to accept other vehicles too.

Second, companies could unload their vehicles at another port altogether

and then drive them to Baltimore for the second part of the process, the processing.

I talked to the Port of New York and New Jersey and Newark.

They said they have been in conversations about this,

that they could take vehicles off a ship

and put them right on a car carrier bound for Baltimore.

And Scott, one advantage of both of those approaches for Baltimore

is it would still support jobs at the port, even while ships can't get through.

where they are already processing their vehicles.

So for instance, there is the Port of Brunswick in Georgia.

It's a long way from Baltimore,

but the port says they have had conversations about being a backup option.

And there are other ports up and down the East Coast that are also good candidates.

They're places that companies are already doing

this vehicle processing for other parts of the U.S. market.

It would mean a longer drive to dealerships,

but a lot of ships go up and down the East Coast and stop at multiple ports,

so it might not require a detour at sea.

And it would mean the carmaker could unload and process the vehicle at the same port

in the same place they already use basically their normal process until the drive.

on this important business in the long term?

Baltimore's location right in the middle of the East Coast,

the expertise and the equipment that Baltimore has for these kinds of vehicles in particular,

that will still be there in the future.

I spoke to one supply chain expert who was very confident that this was not going to

hurt the port's long-term outlook.

Thanks so much for being with us.

the latest in a string of protests that have rocked the continent for months.

Terry Schultz joins us now from Brussels.

Terry, thanks for being with us.

are too low to earn a decent living.

So they're determined to pressure officials into changing the laws.

This last protest on Tuesday saw hundreds of tractors block the area around European

Union headquarters where agricultural ministers were meeting.

Road traffic was absolutely impossible.

And even some metro stations were closed as police tried to keep the chaos contained.

Let's listen to the scene.

And a warning to listeners.

It is the sound of an explosion.

So what you're hearing here is a clash between hundreds of protesters and riot police.

There were fireworks being thrown.

Farm equipment was spraying liquid manure everywhere.

Water cannons were shooting back at the farmers.

There was tear gas being sprayed by police.

Protesters were burning metro stations.

And a couple of months ago, they even toppled a historic statue outside the European Parliament.

And law enforcement officers and protesters are regularly injured.

So these are pretty big disturbances.

Complaints differ based on where the farmers are from.

But many center on getting the EU to soften environmental regulations to limit competition

from outside the bloc, which includes ending negotiations they demand for free trade deals

with countries in Latin and South America.

And as you mentioned, this is a really big one.

They want to lower the administrative burden on producers to deal with what they feel are

just too many rules.

And another problem cited by some farmers, particularly in the east, is an exemption

that's been granted for Ukrainian goods to enter the EU market tariff-free, which, of

course, keeps the prices pretty low.

And this was to help Ukraine after Russia launched the war.

But it's been met with bitter opposition by farmers who say a lot of these goods don't

just transit through their territory, but stay in their markets.

concessions.

The agricultural lobby is very powerful in Europe, and especially when you've got thousands

of farmers and hundreds of tractors blocking everything.

Here's Belgian Deputy Prime Minister David Clarenval after that Tuesday meeting when

the latest protest occurred.

Belgium is currently the rotating EU president, so they chair these meetings.

You'll hear him here through an interpreter.

legitimate concerns of our farmers.

They've suspended some of the stricter rules on pesticide use, and some have provided more

direct financial aid to farmers.

But these very disruptive demonstrations also seem to be costing farmers empathy among the

general public because, as I can tell you firsthand, they inevitably create a very big,

very smelly and dangerous mess.

However, since they seem to be having some impact on decision makers, I expect them to

continue.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Good morning.

They love it.

Like, what's going on?

The world is facing the biggest deficit of cocoa in decades.

Most of cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, about two thirds of them, and most of it in

Ivory Coast and Ghana.

And farmers there have been facing extreme weather, changing climate patterns, which

have just decimated crop harvests.

We're talking heavy rains, floods, then dry season with intense winds, just wrong things

at the wrong time.

All of this has exacerbated problems with pests and diseases.

And not just for one crop season or even two crop seasons.

Cocoa harvests are expected to fall short for the third year in a row.

That doesn't sound good.

So not enough cocoa means companies that make chocolate are having to figure this out and

then pay a lot of money to get their hands on it?

And then on top of that, you add market speculators, which is, you know, traders trying to make

a quick buck on this whole cocoa insanity.

And what you see is cocoa prices just growing and growing.

Right before Valentine's Day, they hit an all-time record from 1977.

That's a long time ago.

Then they just kept going.

Last week, one cocoa price hit $10,000 per metric ton.

Just in time for Easter, too.

To sum it up, cocoa prices more than doubled in just three months and more than tripled

in the past year.

gummy candies and marshmallows instead of chocolate?

Like, is this all about cocoa prices?

and gummy.

So maybe that's part of it.

But yes, big chocolate brands have been adjusting to this new world of extremely expensive cocoa.

We've seen companies like Mars just straight up shrinking the size of some of their chocolate

bars.

We've seen KitKat really lean into those non-chocolate flavors like they've got a

lemon crisp or there's a new chocolate frosted donut flavor.

But mostly brands like Nestle, Hershey, Cadbury, they've just been, you know, raising prices

actually for months.

Price of chocolate at major U.S. stores has increased nearly 15% since the start of last

year.

That's according to an analytics firm, DataWeave.

For comparison, non-chocolate candy inched up just 4% in that time.

So 15% versus 4%.

for that chocolate splurge?

So to fix the shortage of cocoa, a couple of things could happen.

There could be a miraculously healthy harvest all of a sudden, which seems unlikely.

Or it will take a while.

You know, it takes years for newly planted trees to start producing cocoa beans.

Companies that make chocolate are saying they're planning to keep raising prices.

And the interesting thing is that people have not been cutting back on chocolate despite

these higher prices.

You know, it's an indulgence.

People maybe expect to pay more.

There's a whole word for it, right?

Chocoholic.

People are crazy about chocolate.

So that's a big question, whether people will start scaling back or maybe we'll start

seeing just like more and more really tiny chocolate bars instead of the big ones, which

frankly, maybe we could all use.

So that's another way to solve the problem.

That's NPR correspondent Alina Seljuk.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Our director is Michael Ratcliffe.

Nisha Hynes, and Phil Edfors.

Sarah Lucy Oliver is our executive producer.

Jerry Holmes is our deputy managing editor.

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