By IPS Correspondents
SAN PEDRO, Cote D'Ivoire, Jan 16 2003 (IPS)

When, at first light, dugout canoes begin to paddle past the large-calibre machine gun trained on the mouth of San Pedro’s port, the soldiers stationed there barely bat an eye.

It is not the fishermen, heading for the Atlantic Ocean with their home-made hooks, nets and sails that worries them.

Bunkered at one of West Africa’s most important shipping points, the soldiers are concerned with one thing: keeping their country’s war from threatening one-fifth of the world’s cocoa export, loaded by the thousands of tonnes every day onto the freightliners docked nearby.

‘’There are five times more soldiers here now than before,” says Bernard Koumassi, a shipping company representative at the port. ‘’We have an agreement with the army to ensure that we can continue to export the cocoa.’ ‘

Cote d’Ivoire, the world’s number one producer of cocoa, has been at war for nearly four months, and the fighting is now 100 kilometres from San Pedro, the country’s second-largest port.

With each passing week the gunfire, helicopter raids, troop movements, and military checkpoints that terrorise the population also threaten to destroy this nation’s most crucial agricultural product – a crop used to make much of the world’s chocolate.

Forty percent of the world’s cocoa comes from Cote d’Ivoire, and half of the country’s harvest passes through San Pedro.

Midway through the main harvest season and with the war less than a morning’s drive away, the port is still full of life – forklifts scurrying from flatbeds to warehouses to freighters as more ships wait offshore for their turn to dock.

But the bustle carries with it a palpable tension – a tension new to Cote d’Ivoire, once one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa.

‘’Everyone wants to send their harvest at the same time, so there’s a terrible congestion,” says Francis N’Guessan, a supervisor at the port. ‘’ We’re all afraid that the war is going ruin everything.”

The war began in September when a rebel group tried to oust President Laurent Gbagbo and seized the northern half of the country.

Two other rebel factions emerged in late November, capturing a string of towns in the West of the former French colony. The conflict has since spread to the cocoa-rich southwest, with Liberian fighters – known for their drug use and indiscriminate violence – joining the rebel ranks.

All the rebels accuse the government of fanning ethnic hatred, and want Gbagbo to resign. The western rebels have identified San Pedro as one of their primary objectives.

As France, which has more than 2,000 soldiers in Cote d’Ivoire, and West African mediators struggle to help resolve the crisis, the war has wreaked havoc on the lives of all involved in getting the world a sizeable chunk of its cocoa.

A country-wide curfew, imposed since the beginning of the conflict, has complicated the customary round-the-clock staffing of the port. ‘’We used to work all night with no problem,” says N’Guessan. ‘’Now we need armed escorts to do so and it’s hard to provide food and water for the workers. It costs us a lot of money.”

For the hundreds of labourers employed to get the cocoa beans out of their dusty burlap sacks and onto conveyor belts that dump into multi-tonne shipping containers, a strenuous and low-wage job has gotten worse.

‘’The war has made it very hard to get to work every day,” says Bamba Moussa, a 24-year-old labourer at the port. ‘’At the checkpoints the soldiers think we’re rebels because our families come from the north.”

Moussa is the leader of a team of eight labourers, each of whom can earn nearly seven U.S. dollars on a good day, he says, if they manage to rip open enough sacks of cocoa to fill 10 two-tonne shipping containers.

In the fertile region surrounding San Pedro, farmers are abandoning thousands of acres of cocoa, leaving their crops to rot in the fields as they flee fighting.

At dawn on New Year’s Day, Anne-Marie Bozoua awoke to the sound of exploding grenades and gunfire in Neka, a village near the Liberian border, some 120 kilometres from San Pedro.

‘’I thought it was our army celebrating the New Year,” she says from a makeshift Red Cross displaced persons centre in San Pedro, where she is recovering from a bullet wound in her right arm and a rifle-butt blow to her head.

The insurgents ‘’seized several cocoa trucks and filled three rice sacks with money they stole”, says Bozoua, who says the fighters attacked her village from Liberia. ‘’I saw them slit one man’s throat and shoot another in the chest. His body just opened up everywhere.”

Just down the road from the Red Cross centre are the mammoth walled-off compounds of some of the world’s richest cocoa export companies, where a stubborn public air of calm and normalcy persists.

‘’I don’t know about others, but we have a good stock on hand,” says Pierre Ouattara, an operations director for the cocoa branch of Archer Daniels Midland. While he concedes that this year’s harvest will not measure up to those of previous years, he insists that the cocoa export has ‘’about the same rhythm as usual. We don’t sense any panic.”

But in fields not far from the air-conditioned executive offices, there is chaos. ‘’The cocoa’s not coming in at all,” says a Lebanese merchant based in San Pedro, who would give his name only as Attie.

The rebels seized 12 of his cocoa trucks near Neka, says Attie, looted his storage facility there, and held his son hostage for three days.

Most years by mid-January he would have already bought more than 20,000 tonnes of cocoa beans from farmers to sell to the top export companies.

‘’This year I haven’t even done 3,000 tonnes yet,” he says. ‘’Our work is completely paralysed.”

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