The Chocolate Nomad

The Nomadic Harvest Begins

In the predawn hush of a West African forest, a small camp stirs to life among the cocoa trees. Beneath a makeshift shelter of tarpaulin and bamboo, the Konaté family huddles around a glowing charcoal fire. A pot of porridge bubbles as 12-year-old Awa Konaté sleepily rubs her eyes. Today will be like every other day for the past two months: as the first light filters through the canopy, Awa and her parents will fan out into the lush green gloom, baskets in hand, to harvest cocoa pods. They are far from their home, living in a temporary camp set up for the harvest season. By sunrise, the quiet forest will echo with the thunk of machetes striking husks and the laughter and calls of dozens of other migrant families scattered through the plantation, all part of the annual ritual of the cocoa harvest.

The Konatés are chocolate nomads – families who follow the ripening of cocoa pods as diligently as birds following the seasons. Each year, they journey hundreds of miles from their drought-scarred home in northern Mali to the humid cocoa-growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire. They travel in packed buses and rattling trucks, carrying only what they need: cooking pots, mats to sleep on, and simple tools. When they arrive at a cocoa farm that needs extra hands, they construct a temporary village on the margins of the fields. During harvest months, these makeshift communities of tents and huts spring up amid the plantations, then vanish with hardly a trace once the work is done. It’s a hard life on the move, dictated by the flowering and fruiting of the cacao trees, but for thousands of families like the Konatés, it has become a way of life – one that spans countries and even continents in the global pursuit of chocolate.

Life on the Cocoa Trail

Under the dense shade of cocoa orchards, the day’s labor unfolds in a steady, rhythmic cadence. Awa’s father, Mamadou, uses a long-handled knife to slice ripe golden pods off the tree trunks, careful not to damage the flowering buds that will become next season’s crop. Awa and her mother gather the fallen pods and crack them open with practiced whacks of a machete. Inside each gourd-like pod lies a cluster of damp white beans – cacao seeds enveloped in sweet, sticky pulp. The air fills with the tangy-sweet smell of fermenting fruit as families pile the wet seeds into baskets. Later, the beans will be fermented under banana leaves and dried under the sun on woven mats. But the Konatés will not be around by then – their job is to bring in the harvest, and once the trees have been stripped of pods, the family will move on.

For generations, families across West Africa have migrated with the cocoa harvest in search of opportunity. In Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s leading cocoa producer, seasonal workers from Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and beyond make up a significant portion of the workforce on cocoa plantations. Some are entire families, while others are fathers and older sons who leave younger children and grandparents behind in the village. They come because back home the rains have been fickle, the crops meager, and there are few ways to earn cash. Word travels that cocoa farms in the south need labor right after the rainy season, when the pods are heavy and plentiful. And so, each year after their own subsistence crops are harvested, waves of migrant farmers trek down from the savannas and Sahel into the emerald forests, joining the cocoa caravan.

Life on the cocoa trail is a mix of hope and hardship. On one hand, there is the promise of income – perhaps a few hundred dollars for weeks of work, money that can keep a family fed and clothed, maybe pay school fees or buy a small parcel of land someday. On the other hand, the challenges are immense. The Konatés and others like them often sleep in open-sided huts with thatched roofs that barely keep out the torrential rains. They have no electricity or clean water; at night, the darkness is absolute save for flickering lanterns. Malaria-bearing mosquitoes whine in the humid air. Medical care is distant, so a machete gash or a bout of dysentery can be life-threatening. Yet Mamadou and his wife, Aissatou, endure these privations for the sake of that cocoa income. “We barely survive doing this,” Mamadou says quietly as he slings a sack of freshly harvested pods over his shoulder. “But if we stay home, we have nothing. Here, at least we can earn something for our children.”

By noon, the tropical sun hangs high and heavy. The families take a brief break, gathering under a giant shade tree at the edge of the farm. Awa plays with other children, tossing around a few cocoa pods as improvised toys. Her mother ladles out spicy peanut stew over cassava fufu from a communal pot – a simple but filling lunch for the exhausted laborers. The conversation among the adults is in a babel of languages: Bambara from Mali, Mooré from Burkina, Dioula and Baoulé from Côte d’Ivoire. These harvest camps are a cultural melting pot. Strangers from different countries become neighbors and allies. They swap stories of home and news from afar. An elder from Burkina strums a homemade guitar and sings a wistful song about the rains back in his village. For a moment, weary faces brighten. In this transient community, bound together by work and fate, there is a sense of solidarity. Each family here has undertaken the same gamble – leaving home to follow the cocoa, hoping it will reward their sacrifice.

As the midday heat ebbs, the workers return to the groves for the afternoon push. There is urgency in the air; the harvest season is short, and they must gather every pod they can. Children like Awa work alongside their parents. She deftly scoops cocoa beans from cracked pods and heaps them into a wooden bucket. At twelve years old, she knows how to handle a machete almost as well as the adults – a skill she learned out of necessity. Here, the line between work and childhood blurs. Awa chats with her friend Salif as they work; he is a few years older and dreams of one day seeing the big coastal city, Abidjan, though he’s not entirely sure where it is. Neither Awa nor Salif has set foot in a school in months. In theory, this is “temporary” – they will catch up on lessons when back home – but reality often proves otherwise. Many children of the cocoa trails fall permanently behind in their education. One young migrant from Burkina Faso, who came to Ivory Coast to find schooling, admitted with a sad smile that he hadn’t attended classes in five years; the quest for a better life through cocoa had instead trapped him in an endless harvest cycle.

As dusk approaches, the day’s haul of cocoa beans is heaped into a fermenting pit and covered with banana leaves. The rich scent of fermenting pulp mixes with the woodsmoke drifting from the cooking fires. The Konatés trudge back to their tent, bodies aching and sticky with sweat. They will sleep early, under a mosquito net patched with string, so they can rise before dawn and begin again. In a week or two, this farm’s harvest will be done. Mamadou will carefully tally their earnings – perhaps by the kilogram of beans collected or a flat season rate promised by the farm owner. Then the family will decide: head home with their hard-won pay, or join another harvest farther east, where the pods are just reaching peak ripeness. In this way, some families manage to string together back-to-back harvests, roaming from one region’s cocoa belt to another’s, following the staggered calendar of the crop. Their journey might take them from Ivory Coast into neighboring Ghana, or down into Cameroon – even, for the most adventurous, across the ocean to Brazil or Ecuador if opportunities arose and visas weren’t such an impossible dream. In reality, few can afford such far-flung travel, but the notion that “somewhere else, the cocoa is waiting” persists as a tantalizing idea.

A Tradition with Deep Roots

The concept of following harvests is as old as agriculture itself. But following the cocoa has a particularly rich and bittersweet history. Long before families like the Konatés crisscrossed West Africa chasing seasonal work, the cocoa bean had itself traveled across the world on the backs of human migration – some voluntary, much of it forced. The story of chocolate is entwined with journeys of explorers, colonists, slaves, and farmers moving across continents.

Cacao, the source of chocolate, is native to the rainforests of Central and South America. In ancient times, the Maya and Aztec people cultivated cocoa trees in their homelands and celebrated chocolate as the “food of the gods.” While these early farmers weren’t nomadic in harvesting – they tended their trees in place – cocoa’s value set it moving along trade routes. By the 16th century, Spanish conquerors became the first “chocolate nomads” of a sort, carrying sacks of cocoa beans across the Atlantic to Europe and later transplanting the trees to new colonies. By the 17th and 18th centuries, the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese had introduced cocoa cultivation to the Old World tropics: islands in the Caribbean, the Philippines, Indonesia, West Africa. With these seeds and saplings came people – often African slaves or indentured servants – forced to migrate to where cocoa would grow.

In the 1800s, tiny São Tomé and Príncipe, islands off the coast of West Africa, became the world’s largest cocoa producers, but at a horrific human cost. Plantation owners there relied on what was effectively slave labor, importing thousands of impoverished people from Angola and other African lands to do the back-breaking work of cocoa farming. Families were torn apart by these brutal migrations. Though slavery was officially abolished, the practice continued under thin disguises. In the early 1900s, reports of atrocities – workers beaten, starved, held captive – on São Tomé’s cocoa plantations sparked international outrage. The scandal reached the ears of British chocolate companies, and figures like William Cadbury (whose family’s chocolate business bought São Toméan cocoa) campaigned to end the abuse. Eventually, Cadbury and others boycotted the island’s “blood chocolate,” and the cocoa industry shifted to new places like the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) and Ivory Coast. But the legacy was clear: the wealth of chocolate had always depended on uprooting people and exploiting their labor.

As cocoa took root in West Africa in the early 20th century, a new wave of migration began – this time involving African farmers themselves moving to find land to grow the “brown gold.” Ghana’s forested west and Ivory Coast’s virgin jungles became frontiers of opportunity. In the 1920s and 1930s, young men from Ghana’s crowded coastal regions and even neighboring countries ventured into sparsely populated interior forests to stake out cocoa farms. They hacked villages out of the wilderness, planted cocoa seedlings and waited years for the first pod. Many brought their families once the land was producing. Often these were not temporary migrations but one-way journeys – pioneers establishing new cocoa communities. A famous Ghanaian legend tells of Tetteh Quarshie, who in 1876 returned from the island of Fernando Po (Equatorial Guinea) with a few cocoa beans hidden in his pockets, planting the seeds of what would become Ghana’s cocoa empire. Whether myth or fact, it symbolizes how knowledge – and people – traveled to spread cocoa’s cultivation.

In Ivory Coast, migration for cocoa became a cornerstone of the nation’s growth. After independence in 1960, the Ivorian government actively encouraged workers from abroad to immigrate and farm cocoa and coffee. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, tens of thousands of families from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea moved into Ivory Coast’s forests, drawn by the chance to become landowners and cash-crop farmers. Many Ivorian landowners welcomed them, leasing out plots in exchange for a share of the crop. Entire villages of foreign-born cocoa farmers blossomed in the Ivorian countryside. For a while it was a win-win: Ivory Coast’s cocoa production surged to number one in the world, and the migrant families earned far more than they could back home. But over time, this influx created tension. By the 1990s, land grew scarce and economic woes fanned xenophobic flames. Migrant farmers who had lived in Ivory Coast for decades suddenly found themselves disparaged as outsiders. Access to land and nationality became explosive issues, contributing to civil conflicts in the 2000s. Even so, the seasonal flow of labor never truly stopped. To this day, as each cocoa season arrives, new faces show up in the old camps – the pull of a paying harvest proving stronger than political turbulence.

Journeys Across Continents

Although West Africa produces the lion’s share of the world’s cocoa and thus sees the most extensive harvest migrations, it is far from the only place where chocolate nomads roam. Cocoa’s orbit spans the equatorial band around the globe, and wherever the pods ripen, people will travel for the work. In Latin America and Asia, similar stories unfold amid different landscapes and cultures.

Consider Indonesia, the largest cocoa producer in Asia. In the late 20th century, the country experienced a cocoa boom that transformed lives and landscapes – and uprooted families. Sulawesi, a sprawling Indonesian island, went from almost no cocoa in the 1970s to becoming a global cacao hotspot by the 1990s. How? Small farmers embraced the crop after seeing its profitability, and a wave of migrants from other islands, especially densely populated Java, answered the call of this chocolate frontier. Families packed their belongings onto boats and ferries bound for Sulawesi’s green interior. They cleared patches of rainforest to plant cocoa, often learning techniques from those who came before. These Javanese migrants were not following a seasonal harvest and then going home; like earlier African pioneers, they relocated to chase a dream of cocoa riches. For a time, many prospered as yields soared. Sulawesi became synonymous with mass-produced cocoa. But booms can bust. By the 2000s, pests and disease attacked the cocoa trees, yields dropped, and global prices stagnated. Some settlers cut down their cocoa and left in search of the next opportunity elsewhere – perhaps oil palm plantations or gold mines – a new kind of nomadism spurred by the fickle fortunes of farming. Yet many stayed, adapting by diversifying crops or improving their cocoa methods. The legacy is visible today: central Sulawesi’s hills are quilted with small cocoa plots, and one can still meet old Javanese couples who recall their migration decades ago, and whose children and grandchildren carry on the cocoa farming tradition on Sulawesi soil.

On the other side of the world, in the lush Amazon basin of South America, cocoa has been both a traditional crop and a new promise. In Ecuador and Peru, indigenous communities have grown cacao for generations, often in wild or semiwild groves mixed under the rainforest canopy. These farmers traditionally didn’t need to migrate; the cocoa grew in their backyard forests as part of a diverse ecosystem. But economic pressures and opportunities have introduced a degree of mobility here as well. In Peru’s eastern lowlands, for instance, the past twenty years have seen a significant shift: thousands of Andean families from highland regions have moved into the tropical foothills, encouraged by government programs to cultivate cacao instead of coca (the raw plant used for cocaine). For these families, it’s a voluntary migration away from the troubles of the illicit drug economy towards the hope of stable, legal income through cocoa. They arrive in humid valleys like San Martín and Huánuco, often with little more than a few sacks of clothes and some farming tools, and learn to tend cacao trees on assigned plots of land. Life is not easy – the jungle soil can be capricious, unfamiliar pests attack the crops, and newcomers face the isolation of living in frontier settlements hacked out of dense forest. Some give up and return to their mountain homes. But many persevere, forming cooperatives, building new communities literally rooted in cacao. They take pride in producing fine-flavor cocoa coveted by artisanal chocolate makers. In a sense, they have become nomads by circumstance, leaving ancestral lands to follow the call of a different harvest, one that might secure a better future for their children.

Even within established cocoa-growing countries like Brazil or Mexico, there is movement tied to the crop. In Brazil’s Bahia region, once the powerhouse of cocoa production in the Americas, colonels (cocoa plantation owners) historically employed entire colônia of workers – families who lived on the estate year-round. Those workers didn’t migrate seasonally; they were bound to the land in a feudal arrangement, often for generations, until a devastating blight (witches’ broom disease) in the 1990s collapsed the industry and sent thousands of laborers scattering to find other work. Now, Brazil’s cocoa revival in the Amazonian north has attracted some of those uprooted families to venture into new plantations in Pará and Rondônia, repeating the cycle of internal migration. In Central America, a country like Nicaragua sees internal migrants from drier western regions move to its humid Atlantic coast to farm cacao under reforestation initiatives. And in the Caribbean, a place like the Dominican Republic – one of the largest organic cocoa exporters – relies mostly on local family farms, but occasionally Haitian workers cross the border seeking jobs in the cocoa drying and processing facilities, a small parallel to the much larger migrations for coffee and sugarcane in that region.

Different lands, different circumstances – yet a common thread runs through these stories. Whether it’s West African villagers, Indonesian islanders, or Peruvian highlanders, families across continents are drawn by the prospect (or simply the necessity) of making a living from the chocolate trade. They pack their lives into bundles and set off, following the scent of opportunity that wafts from the cacao pod.

Trials and Triumphs on the Road

The life of a chocolate nomad is fraught with challenges that outsiders can scarcely imagine. The work itself is physically punishing. Harvesting cocoa is not a mechanized process – it is done almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago, by hand with knife and machete. Each ripe pod must be cut down individually. A strong worker might harvest hundreds of pods in a day, swinging a sharpened blade attached to a pole to reach those higher up, then stooping to gather them. Arms tire, necks crane, and feet squelch in the mud of the plantation floor. Then comes the pod breaking: cracking thick rinds open with a blunt blade or a wooden club, which can blister hands and send shards flying. The work doesn’t end when the sun sets; often, by flashlight or firelight, workers continue to heap, ferment, or transport beans into the night if rain threatens to spoil the crop. It’s common to see scars on the shins and hands of veteran harvesters – etched stories of slipped machetes and thorny vines.

Beyond the labor itself, there are the dangers of the environment. In the steamy jungles, venomous snakes sometimes coil around the branches or hide under fallen leaves, startling unwary pickers. Malaria and other tropical diseases lurk. For families on the move, healthcare is often an afterthought; an illness can turn dire out in the field. Then there’s the ever-present threat of exploitation. Many migrant harvesters are at the mercy of middlemen and farm owners for wages. Some landowners pay a fixed sum per season, others by the quantity of beans gathered. Either way, the balance of power seldom favors the laborer. It’s not unheard of for unscrupulous farm managers to undercount the sacks of dried beans or inflate deductions for food and lodging before paying the workers. A family might work a whole season only to find their earnings whittled away by debts – perhaps for advances taken to pay for the journey south, or inflated prices for rice and provisions bought on credit at the farm’s trading post. In extreme cases, this system can resemble the indentures of old, binding workers in a cycle of owing and laboring.

Child labor is another painful reality. While cocoa farming is often a family endeavor in one’s own plot, on commercial plantations the use of children as workers remains widespread despite international scrutiny. Families who migrate together typically have little choice but to have their children help; there’s no school in the middle of the forest camp, and idle supervision is a luxury they can’t afford when everyone must contribute. Some parents also believe it’s a necessary apprenticeship for the child – teaching them the skills to survive in a world that hasn’t offered them much else. Yet the cost is high: lost education, and the risk of injury from sharp tools and heavy loads at a tender age. Numerous human rights reports over the years have chronicled the haunting sight of children carrying sacks of cocoa beans almost as big as themselves, or wielding machetes to split pods, their small bodies marked by scars and calluses. It is a bitter irony that these children, who toil to make one of the world’s most beloved sweets, often have never even tasted a chocolate bar. In many cocoa-growing communities, chocolate – the finished product – is an exotic luxury, far removed from the raw beans that are their livelihood.

And yet, amid these trials, there are triumphs and moments of sweetness in the lives of the chocolate nomads. There is the satisfaction of a good harvest – when the rains have been kind, the pods abundant, and the quality of beans high. On such years, a family might earn enough to actually get ahead a little. Perhaps Mamadou and Aissatou Konaté manage to save up to buy a motorbike, making next year’s travels easier than cramming into an overloaded truck. Maybe they afford a few more goats or a new tin roof for their house back home. In some cases, after years of seasonal migrations, a family can accumulate enough money or goodwill with a landowner to secure their own small plot of cocoa trees. That is often the ultimate dream – to stop wandering and become a settled farmer, modestly prosperous, sending one’s children to school and eventually passing on a cocoa orchard to them. A few do achieve it, effectively graduating from laborer to landholder. Their journey may still have started on the rough road of migrant harvesting, but it culminates in a place they can finally call home.

In the camps, there is also a strong sense of community and culture that uplifts spirits. Storytelling is a favorite pastime when the day’s work is done. Under starry skies, elders recount folktales – some about clever spiders and proud lions from West African lore, others more recent and true, like how “Grandpa Amadou” first came to this very farm as a young man and ended up saving enough to send his daughter to university. There are jokes and banter in multiple tongues, and in the absence of televisions or phones, people truly talk to each other. Music and dance often weave into camp life; someone produces a djembe drum or simply claps a rhythm, and soon a circle of dancers – children and grown-ups alike – will hop and sway, their laughter echoing among the cocoa trees. These joyous moments are brief respites from toil, but they create bonds that can last a lifetime. It’s not uncommon for families that met in a harvest camp to keep in touch over years, attending each other’s weddings and funerals, considering themselves kin forged by the shared experience of the road.

Moreover, the knowledge exchanged in these roving communities can be invaluable. Farmers swap tips on everything from combating cocoa diseases to recipes for cooking the wild bushmeat one might trap in the forest. In recent times, some NGOs and agricultural extension workers have started visiting migrant camps to teach better farming practices or literacy classes at night. While still rare, such efforts plant seeds of change. In one camp in Ghana, for example, a volunteer teacher traveling with a church group started a tiny makeshift school under a mango tree, inviting the migrant children for a couple of hours each evening. Twelve-year-old Awa learned to read simple sentences in those twilight classes, kindling dreams that perhaps she could continue her education if her family settles one day. These glimmers of hope can sustain the spirit even when conditions are harsh.

The Rhythm of the Seasons, the Uncertainty of the Future

From October’s heavy rains to July’s drying winds, the harvest seasons roll on, and with them roll the feet of the nomads. There is a certain rhythm to the year for those who follow the cocoa. Generally, the main harvest in West Africa begins around the end of the rainy season – roughly October – and runs through December or January. Then a smaller “light” harvest might come around May or June. In South America, near the equator, harvest times often complement this: some regions peak in April and May, another small crop in late year. Southeast Asia’s cocoa seasons can differ again. For the truly adventurous and well-connected worker, it’s theoretically possible to hopscotch between harvests across the globe, never really stopping. A veteran harvester half-jokes that if he ever won the lottery (a fanciful notion, as he’s never bought a ticket), he’d buy plane tickets to follow cocoa around the world – “Ivory Coast in November, Brazil in March, Indonesia in July, back to Ghana by October” – an endless loop chasing the ripening pods and fair weather. But of course, for the real nomads, air travel is beyond imagination; their migrations are overland, incremental, and bounded by what they can afford and where they can get permits to work.

The future of these families is caught in a web of larger forces. Climate change, for one, looms as a formidable challenge. Cocoa is finicky about climate – too much heat or too little rain can ruin a crop. In recent years, extreme weather has begun to disrupt the predictability of harvest seasons. Droughts have withered cocoa pods in Ghana; unseasonal heavy rains have caused black rot on Ivory Coast farms; shifting weather patterns confuse the trees, leading to patchier yields. For families who depend on moving to where the harvest is, such uncertainty can be devastating. One year, they might arrive in a region only to find the harvest came early and is mostly done, or failed altogether. Then they must roam further, seeking any farm that still needs labor. Climate change might, ironically, create even more nomads – as previously fertile areas become less reliable, workers may have to travel farther or move into new, more remote zones (often clearing more forest in the process) to find viable cocoa. The map of the chocolate harvest is slowly being redrawn by temperature and rainfall, and the people will follow, as they always have, but with greater strain.

Another factor is the shifting economics of the chocolate industry. There is growing awareness, at least in international discourse, of the plight of cocoa farmers and laborers. Talk of “sustainable chocolate” and fair trade practices has grown louder. Governments in Ivory Coast and Ghana have even tried in recent years to negotiate higher prices for their cocoa to better support farmers. If prices paid to farmers were to rise significantly, perhaps the smallholders could afford to hire local labor at decent wages, alleviating some need for entire families to migrate in desperation. Perhaps more schools and services could reach cocoa communities so that children like Awa wouldn’t have to trade textbooks for machetes. These are hopeful possibilities, but the imbalance of power – between poor cocoa-growing regions and wealthy chocolate-consuming nations – remains vast. For now, each chocolate bar sold in a shiny wrapper still carries only a few cents of income for those at the bottom of the supply chain. Until that changes, poverty will continue to drive the migrations.

The next generation of would-be chocolate nomads may also chart a different course. Many young people from traditional farming families express reluctance to endure the same hardships as their parents. In a Malian village that has sent seasonal workers to Ivory Coast for decades, a 19-year-old aspiring mechanic shakes his head when asked if he’ll ever join the cocoa caravan. “Maybe when I was little, I thought I would go with my father,” he says, “but now I have other plans. I’ve been to the city, I’ve seen there are other ways to live.” If enough youth choose urban jobs or other trades, a labor shortage could hit cocoa farms. In fact, some regions are already seeing aging farmer populations with fewer young replacements. This might force changes – possibly higher wages to attract workers, or attempts at mechanization (though cocoa harvesting remains stubbornly difficult to automate given the scattered pods under dense shade). It might also lead to more migration from even poorer areas – an influx of new nomads from places wracked by conflict or climate disaster, willing to do the work others shun. The cycle of who follows the harvest could shift, but the fundamental dynamic – people moving in search of a livelihood – will persist.

Still, there are rays of optimism. Various initiatives aim to improve conditions for migratory farm families. Some cooperatives in West Africa have started providing mobile clinics that travel to remote farms during harvest, so that migrant workers can get basic healthcare and their children vaccinated. Pilot programs in Côte d’Ivoire are experimenting with portable schooling – essentially a traveling teacher who moves with clusters of migrant children, ensuring they don’t fall too far behind in reading and math during harvest months. In an age of mobile phones, even nomadic communities are not as isolated as before. Farmers now share information via WhatsApp, warning each other of regions where work is scarce or celebrating when prices rise. Such connectivity can prevent the worst exploitation, as word spreads fast if a certain farm owner failed to pay or mistreated workers. The nomads are, in a way, organizing, even if informally – building a support network across distance.

A Harvest of Stories

Night has fallen again on the cocoa camp. The final pods have been collected, and the Konaté family is preparing to depart at first light. Their harvest here is finished; ahead lies a journey back home to Mali. The children chatter excitedly at the prospect of seeing their village again, of sleeping in their own hut and playing under the familiar old baobab tree by their compound. Awa cradles a small treasure in her hands – a dried cocoa pod she kept as a souvenir. To her, it’s more than a pod; it’s a reminder of months spent in a faraway forest, of the friends she made from other lands, of the work she did that helped her family earn their keep. She has seen more of the world by age 12 than many might in a lifetime, though much of it was under the canopy of cacao leaves. As Awa drifts to sleep on her mat, she wonders if they will come back next year. Her parents have murmured about possibly staying home if they can manage, perhaps trying a new trading business with the money they saved. But Awa isn’t sure – she senses the pull of the cocoa is not so easily escaped.

Across the globe, countless stories echo the Konatés’ experience, each with its unique details. In one story, a young father in Sulawesi recalls arriving in a jungle with nothing and now standing amid a thriving cocoa orchard he planted himself – hardship blossomed into success. In another, a grandmother in Ghana remembers as a girl walking for days behind her parents, carrying a bundle of cassava and a basket of cocoa pods on her head, forging a path that her own children later followed in her footsteps. There are stories of heartbreak too – a boy injured by a falling pod who never fully recovered, a family that got cheated out of their pay and had to beg for transport home. These narratives seldom make the headlines, yet they quietly form the backbone of the chocolate industry.

Every time we unwrap a chocolate bar or savor a piece of dark truffle, we partake in these journeys. The sweetness on our tongue is built on the labor of families moving through tropical nights and dawns, navigating muddy roads and border checkpoints, chasing a crop that in turn chases the rains. The modern convenience of having chocolate year-round, from dozens of countries, is made possible by an intricate human ballet: as one region’s season ends, another begins, and there are always hands ready to pick up the work. We rarely see those hands, much less the faces of the children and parents and grandparents whose lives revolve around the rhythms of cacao. They remain, by and large, invisible nomads, even as their collective effort spans continents and feeds a global appetite.

Yet, change may come if we start to value the human story as much as the product. Perhaps the term “chocolate nomad” will one day be a relic of the past – a chapter in history when people had to wander for work in the chocolate trade – because future generations managed to root cocoa farming in stability and fairness. In the meantime, however, the nomads are still out there, moving with the seasons. The next time you bite into a piece of chocolate, think of dawn breaking in a distant orchard and a family rising from sleep under a canvas sheet. Think of Awa and Mamadou and Aissatou, and millions like them, whose journey from farm to farm, harvest to harvest, carries the gift of cocoa to the world. Inside each chocolate bar lies not just the flavor of cocoa, but the spirit of perseverance and hope of the families who follow the harvest across horizons – a rich, complex story as bittersweet as chocolate itself.