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Heating Oil and a Haiku

April 9, 2024April 8, 2024humanist55

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

25% of the yield of a barrel of Crude Oil is Heating Oil and the Crude Oil Market reached a value of US $ 1424.38 Bn. in 2022 so $356.09

I mentioned Bitumen amongst nearly-rans for “B” commodities and we just covered Gasoline and we now come to another derivative of Crude Oil – Heating Oil – all four of these substances can be traded as commodities and they all have their niche roles in trading portfolios – Heating Oil, for example, is a product subject to seasonal demand – alternating depending on which hemisphere you are in. Heating oil is actually kerosene or paraffin and these terms are often used interchangeably but I will be returning to Kerosene under K and in any case, Heating Oil is traded as a distinct “futures” product. But what I want to talk about today, is the process by which the three derivatives are extracted, simultaneously, from crude oil – Fractional Distillation.

Some of you may remember this from school days though I am not sure whether it would have been taught in Geography or Chemistry classes – but the diagram below is one of those “once learned never forgotten” things – a piece of magic at the heart of the 20^th Century industrial age. Elegantly simple in principle, probably a fiendishly tricky piece of engineering in practice, a Fractional Distillation Tower is what you see in oil refineries and crude oil, once heated to the point of becoming a vapour, enters the tower at the bottom and as the various components rise and cool at different points in the tower, they condense and are drawn off separately. The most volatile reach the top of the tower – Butane and Propane whilst the heaviest and thickest remain at the bottom of the tower – such as Bitumen or Asphalt.

Although this particular diagram doesn’t show it and most of the items appear to be fuels, there are also substances like Naptha which go on to be used in other industrial processes – Naptha is a very volatile solvent. Other industries also use hydro-carbons to make plastics with the addition of certain other chemicals and all of these things, fuels, solvents and plastics can be seen to be releasing stored “fossil” carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere causing global warming or in the case of plastics contributing a material which will not breakdown easily in the environment and which is slowly poisoning the food chain…

There is no choice about what components come out of a fractional distillation tower except in as much as different sources of crude oil do contain slightly different proportions of hydrocarbon fractions. It makes one think what might happen if we ever do get near the “bottom of the oil barrel” – we might have weaned ourselves off petrol and diesel vehicles but we might still need some plastics or we might still need bitumen for building roads for electric cars and yet whenever you distil crude oil – you get a whole selection of products, whether you want or need them all, or not…

A Haiku

And so to the poem which today is a Haiku. And yes, in my Theme Reveal, I promised a Heroic Ode and that would be a difficult one to write about Heating Oil although some might consider a Haiku about Heating Oil equally challenging – however the Haiku is an extremely popular poetry form these days having spread far beyond its native Japan and Heroic Odes are decidedly out of fashion, so I decided to meet the challenge of writing about Heating Oil with a Haiku…
Infamously, the Punk poet John Cooper Clarke wrote:-

To write a poem
in seventeen syllables
is very diffic…

But the haiku demands more than seventeen syllables, the syllables need to be distributed 5-7-5 and the theme of a Haiku should be related to nature and also “focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colourful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment.” You may say, with some justification that Heating Oil is not a very promising subject for such a philosophical, traditional, and compact form – but I have done my best…

Heating Oil – A Haiku

Autumn advances
We dip the heating oil tank
Dark smell of Winter

Gasoline and Gold and a Glosa Poem

April 8, 2024May 10, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion
Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion

When I first researched a list of “Commodities”, Gold and Gasoline were the only two which came up for “G” on the best list I could find, but what a pair! Gold has been sought for centuries – valued for its incorruptible nature though it has arguably been one of the greatest sources of corruption of the human heart. Similarly, crude oil – the source of Gasoline, has shaped the political map ever since its component “gifts” were discovered and exploited with disastrous consequences for many peoples and for the world and its environment as a whole. So I decided to deal with both these commodities together – one constant and immutable, the other volatile, expendable and dangerous…

Gasoline is used for transportation and energy production worldwide and is severely implicated in global warming as a result of CO² emissions. The spread of the motorcar through the 20^th century reshaped our lives and living arrangements and wars have been fought to secure, steal or destroy other’s oil sources. Arguably. The US, as the largest consumer has fought an undeclared war against the Arab nations since the Second World War to assure the flow of oil although it began with an alliance with Saudi Arabia that promised guaranteed oil supplies in return for non-interference with the Wahabist-based sect of Islam which was espoused there. The consequences of that are another story, but Iraq and Libya (a country that shared its oil wealth amongst its people in an unprecedented way) are but some of the victims of US-led wars designed to keep the best oil flowing in the “right” direction. The oil lobby is the greatest source of “climate deniers” although the car lobby and many car drivers are equally denying that Climate Change is happening and man-made.

One of many vehicles owned by members of the Osage Nation. COURTESY RAYMOND RED CORN

A salutary tale of the corruption that surrounds commodities such as oil (and gold), is the recent movie Killers of the Flower Moon, in which members of the Osage tribe of Native American Indians are at first surfeited in wealth (see above) derived from the rights to oil found on their land but how an unscrupulous local politician then seeks to murder them and acquire their lands into his family.

Gold has also been a source of conflict and a regulator of success in wars as this article outlines. Paper money used to be backed by reserves of the actual gold which it symbolised and this was known as the “Gold Standard” and although this system has been replaced everywhere by the Fiat system the prevalence of inflation as a result of the severing of the link, has risen worldwide. Having gold bullion reserves finances wars – for example, it is estimated that Californian gold was responsible for 10% of the cost of the American Civil War. The UK had access to gold produced by mines in its colonies such as South Africa which the mines were obliged to sell to the treasury whilst over the course of the two World wars, Germany had no such access and so the UK was able to pay for some of the food and armaments that came from the US (and borrowed the rest which it only paid off in 2006).

Gold Fields South Deep Mine The Twin Shaft Complex comprises a Main and Ventilation Shaft. The Main Shaft extends in a single drop to 2,998m below
surface, while the ventilation shaft extends to a depth of 2,947m below the surface. *That’s almost 3 kilometres…*

Oil and thence Gasoline prices are also levers of power in war e.g. the embargo on Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine although to pull those levers means adversely affecting the price of oil commodities and the US has to try to persuade its Arab producer allies to release more product to stabilise the market. The price of gold and oil or gasoline (their markets show some different behaviours) are some of the most important commodity trading standards in the market and the first thing that many in the know will look at each morning.

A gold Mycenaean brooch in the form of an octopus, Mycenae, mid 2nd millenium BCE. (Archaeological Museum, Mycenae)

Of course, gold has decorative and cultural uses as well as bullion – jewellery, crowns, ceremonial cups and it is because it doesn’t tarnish or corrode that it has had this value since ancient times and so is one of the earliest commodities to be traded.

And so to the poem and having recently written a Ghazal, I decided to try a Glosa…

Glosa, or glose, is a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph. The key to the form is that it incorporates the words of another. The glosser, or glosador, advertises a connection to a prior text.

Gold and Gasoline

Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold […]
Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold, […]
Price of many a crime untold …

Thomas Hood, ‘Gold’

Gold has commanded lust of kings
and beggars both who wish for things
or for gold’s sake alone
a useless dragon’s hoard
coins, bullion bars and rings
miners gave their lives for it
soldiers died protecting it
across the globe merchants trade
the metal that will never fade
Price of many a crime untold …

Shallow mines are damp and cold
deep in the Earth’s heat lies the gold
where miners in the new South Africa
still sweat to feed the dragon’s hoard
a ring with which to have and hold
a brooch to sparkle and attract the eye
a sovereign, symbol of King and country
pays for the soldiers’ dice with death
to die or win and maybe loot a little wealth
Price of many a crime untold …

And gasoline’s story is much the same
black gold fought over in the Great Game
of nations tampering with other nations
to keep their cars moving, lights burning
the destruction of Libya a tale of infamy
the treasures of Iraq to the winds scattered
because compared to oil, culture didn’t matter
and wars are won and lost by oil’s logistics
and the market’s fluctuating statistics
Price of many a crime untold …

Whilst gold has spawned so many crimes
it doesn’t threaten climate-changing times
it will not end our human hubris
and rarely even give us bliss
as when we ring the wedding chimes
both have brought us good and bad
and if we perish, though very sad
we only have ourselves to blame
for seeking gold and gas – the same
Price of many a crime untold …

A link to dVerse Poets Pub for their Open Link Night where I have decided to give this poem an airing…

Frost Futures and a Free Verse Poem

April 6, 2024April 6, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Frost Futures – yes you read it right – you can buy futures in Frost and other weather phenomena! This is at the heart of trading futures as a hedge against the unexpected and though you might argue that frost itself is not a commodity, yet its impact on many grown commodities is potentially devastating and trading in weather futures is a way of insuring against loss… What I have not been able to find are any meaningful figures for the trade in Frost Futures since this is still a rather exotic trade!

Here are some quotes from the CME Group who specialise in Weather Futures:-

“The common cliché is that every conversation begins and ends with the weather. That’s probably because weather is the most common and pervasive risk factor for individuals or businesses. […] a decisive majority of senior finance and risk managers confirm that their businesses are significantly impacted by the weather and a stunning eight out of 10 warn of a new risk: that the emergence of global climate change and accompanying volatile weather patterns will require changes to their business models in the decades ahead. […] Weather cannot be controlled. But with the introduction of the products we offer, its blame for company losses is no longer justifiable. Weather, like any commodity, can be traded and its risks mitigated. Our Weather products offer the ability to manage volumetric risk or the risk due to variability in sales revenues, caused by weather-related fluctuation in levels of consumption.”

Forgive the corporate language but in essence – trading in futures is gambling and weather futures are a way of hedging your bets… That’s it – short and sweet, other commodities beginning with F include Feeder Cattle and Fish and if you are wondering what Feeder Cattle are – they are young cattle which are sold on (often a byproduct of dairy herds who need repeat pregnancies to maintain milk production) for fattening up before selling.

And so to the poem which today is Free Verse – a form which often seems to be the most ubiquitous among modern poets. Free Verse does not use meter or rhyme, but is still are recognisable as ‘poetry’ by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. (Language is a Virus…)

Frost

A beautiful assassin calls at night
you can never be sure when
you may stand guard in your garden
gazing at the glittering array
in the heavens
revealed by a clear sky
and feel in your bones
she is lurking
but she will wait till
cold has driven you
to your warm bed
and in the early hours
she will grip plants
squeezing them to death
by freezing the life blood
in their very veins

You will awaken
to a white wonderland
of sparkling crystals
coating the world
and await the sun’s
sufficient elevation
to melt the assassin’s work
and reveal the extent
of the damage
the body-count
the wilting and the dying
the seedlings cut down
in their infancy
and even as you curse
the late and unpredictable
frost’s devastation
counting the cost
planning the re-planting
you cannot help
but admire the beauty…

Ethanol and an Erasure poem

April 5, 2024April 4, 2024humanist55

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide trade in Ethanol 2022 $83.5 Billion

As a commodity, Ethanol is alcohol made on an industrial scale, from various grains – in the US for example – it is corn which is either dry or wet milled. Wet milling is the same process that has been used for millennia to make alcoholic beverages such as beer, first soaking the grain to convert the seed’s stored starches into sugars which are then boiled out of the “mash” and fermented. If your town has a “Maltings” – that is what it was for… Further distillation at the artisan scale rather than the industrial, produces spirits such as Whisky and in the distillation – another type of alcohol which has formed during fermentation, is separated out – Methyl alcohol which due to its lower boiling point, is the first product to emerge during distillation and is discarded. Methyl alcohol would do you no good to drink – wood alcohol as it used to be known, will send you blind as “Meths” drinkers and drinkers of Absinth found until that drink was outlawed…

Modern Absinth is all Ethanol and no Methanol

Ethyl alcohol is used for medicinal products such as moisturisers or bath salts, and in the car manufacturing process for the production of plastics for dashboards and seats and in a lot of personal care products. Ethanol is also added to petrol making it marginally more carbon friendly but any move to switch over to all ethanol would not work due to the extra land and other resources needed. Methyl alcohol on the other hand, is manufactured from fossil fuels and is used not only as a solvent for many products, but is also further processed to make many other chemical products.

The value of Ethanol worldwide production in 2020 was 98.6 billion litres, the value of alcoholic beverages in the US alone was US$1,055 bn in 2024 so both alcohols for drinks and industrial alcohols are big commodity business! The beverage side is made up of many sources and producers, vineyards, many distilleries, and breweries from very large down to craft beer small. There are also many drinks manufacturers of liqueurs, for example, who use industrially produced ethanol as their product base and ethanol is also used to extract many flavourings for the food industry. I once worked in a factory which created ginger flavouring for Gripe Water by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol at this concentration, the liquid would do you serious damage however, after the quality control samples had been kept for the relevant number of years, instead of throwing them away we added water and sugar to produce a ginger liqueur (for our own consumption I hasten to add and naming no names). You may not be surprised to learn that the alcohol is no longer permitted in the gripe water and the warming, soothing ginger flavour has to be extracted in other ways. But this is mere extraction and addition of a flavour, the really interesting thing about the production of some alcoholic drinks, is how the flavours come about inherent to the process.

A bodega in Jerez – the city for which Sherry is named…

Take for example Sherry. In Spain and Portugal, only certain parts of the grape harvest are considered “dry” enough to make sherry and that which is too sweet is sent to the UK where the apparently unrefined taste of maiden aunts and secret drinkers, is for sweet sherry drunk from tiny glasses – a product that would never pass the lips of a true Iberian! So having made wine from the suitably “fino” grapes, the sherry is then subjected to something which every other winemaker desperately seeks to avoid – oxidation – albeit in a very limited and controlled way. Bodegas are places where the nascent sherry is put into huge barrels to age but which have an airspace at the top separated from the liquid below by a blanket of yeast known as “flor”. It is critical that the flor is not broken and so as sherry is drawn off from the barrel, it must be replaced with fresh wine at an equal rate so that the flor doesn’t sag and split. Whilst in the barrel, the air penetrates the flor and gently oxidises the wine producing the complex flavours of sherry. The Bodega is thus a dynamic blending process in which no batch of sherry will ever be quite the same an another. Some bodegas have a brew which is hundreds of years old and the process of moving sherry through several bodegas produces a beverage of immense complexity and of gradually elevating price. This is different from the blending of whisky where various single-malt whiskies, not all of which would be considered palatable on their own, are mixed to achieve a consistent blended flavour. There is a link between whisky and sherry however, because traditionally, the whisky industry used empty sherry casks to age their whisky and since the refined spirit is excellent at dissolving flavour, it must be supposed that the whisky picks up some subtle notes from the sherry barrels. “Isca” is a Gaelic word for water and whisky is considered “the water of life” in Ireland – as long as you don’t drink too much to often that is…

And so to today’s poem which is an Erasure poem in which you take another poem or piece of prose and cross out words and lines until you are left with a new poem. The text I took is a poem by Hristo Botev a brilliant Bulgarian poet and revolutionary. Born in Kalofer on January 6, 1848. Died a heroic death in the western part of the Bulgarian Range on June 1, 1876, as part of a voivode of 200 rebels who had set out to die for the liberation of their enslaved Fatherland. The inscription chiselled on the granite rock by which he was killed reads: “Your prophecy has come true – you live on!” The poem he wrote is about drinking to forget the dire situation of kin and country and my erasure poem does not substantially change the meaning of it but condenses it into a somewhat more modern form. This can be a good method for editing and sharpening one’s own poems but since I hadn’t written anything alcohol related…

Ethanol

Give me wine
so I can forget
glory and disgrace
forget my birth
my father dear
and souls never curbed
fighting their bequest
forget my family
my father grave
my mother’s tears

The rich man with
his aristocratic airs
the merchant his plunder
the priest reciting holy mass
rob people who must hunger
rob them, you wanton band

We drink, we sing
every hand holds a glass
snarl against the tyrant
taverns too small for us
we shout…
but sober…
we forget pledges, phrases
say no more, roar with laughter
at the people’s sacrifices

While the tyrant rages
ravages our home
slaughters, hangs, flogs
then fines the people tamed

Fill the glass
let me drink
bring my soul its soothing
kill the sober way I think
let my hand grow soft
I’ll drink despite
despite you patriots
– nothing near and dear
and you?
Idiots…

Here is the erased poem…

And here is the original poem…

In the Tavern

by Hristo Botev

It’s hard, it’s hard, so give me wine.
Drunk, I can forget the face
the thing you fools cannot define:
where lies glory – and disgrace.

Forget the country of my birth,
my father’s dear homely nest,
and those whose souls were never curbed,
whose fighting soul was their bequest.

Forget my family in their need,
my father’s grave, my mother’s tears,
and those who’d steal a crust of bread
with all the aristocratic airs.

The rich man with his crookedness,
the merchant thirsting for his plunder,
the priest reciting holy mass,
rob from the people who must hunger.

Rob them. All you wanton band.
Rob them. Who will make a fuss?
Soon they’ll be too tight to stand:
every hand holds up a glass.

We drink, we sing with recklessness,
we snarl against the tyrant foe,
the taverns are too small for us –
we shout: “To the mountains we shall.

We shout, but when we’re sober
we forget our pledges and our phrases
and say no more, and roar with laughter
at the people’s sacrifices.

While all the time the tyrant rages
and ravages our native home,
slaughters, hangs and flogs and curses
then fines the people he has tamed.

So fill the glass and let me drink.
Bring my soul its soothing gift
and kill the sober way I think
and let my manly hand grow soft.

I’ll drink, despite the enemy,
despite all you, great patriots.
There’s nothing near and dear to me,
and you… well. you are idiots.

Copper and A Duplex Poem

April 4, 2024April 4, 2024humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide trade in Copper 2022 $ 304.79

Hang on I hear you say – that’s a “D” poem form but Copper is a “C” commodity – what gives? Well I simply couldn’t find a commodity beginning with D – I looked at Dates but whilst in one sense, everything that is grown and traded is a “commodity”, but this A to Z is looking at commodities in the stricter sense of things that are traded in certain special markets – often as “futures”. A future is something that is bought ahead of time on the gamble that it might have gone up in price come harvest or delivery time. Seemingly Dates are not traded as futures in the way that Cocoa is. So no “D’s” but there are so many “C’s” to choose from hence Copper but with a Duplex poem. Other contenders were Cheese, Coffee, Corn, Cotton, and Crude Oil…

We often refer, often disparagingly, to the Stone Age and somewhat more respectfully to the Iron Age as if that is where the real technology that defines our human race, really began. It’s true that the Stone Age went on for a long time with certain tools remaining unchanged for many thousands of years but there were three great “metal ages” of which Iron was the third – before that, metallurgists cut their teeth during the Copper Age and then the Bronze Age, from which we can say that Copper is one of the oldest important commodities. Even when the second metal age – the Bronze Age began, bronze is mainly copper – an alloy of copper with a small amount of Tin added together (alloyed), the properties are different and better than either on their own – that’s the magic of Metallurgy! To smelt Copper, you have to reach 1,085 °C but this is still less than the Iron of the Third Metal Age would require (1,538 °C) however copper and more so bronze tools were an improvement on the stone tools that preceded them – in fact, it is thought that a shortage of good material for making stone tools in Mesopotamia, was the driving force behind the development of Copper smelting – this is the same area where Barley had been part of an agricultural revolution. Agriculture produced a surplus of food liberating man to develop trading leading to the Urban revolution and this in turn, was a pre-requisite for the research and development of metallurgy.

There is a fascinating timeline of the development and importance of Copper here. Initially, Copper was cold-worked because unlike Aluminium, copper occurs as a native (pure metal form) metal in nature and it is both soft and malleable to work into objects. However, as people experimented with smelting, they discovered that the addition of sometimes small amounts of other metals could improve the qualities of the resultant alloy – qualities like stiffness or the ability to take and hold a sharp edge (necessary for weapons – sadly a driver of technology through the ages). And so the Copper Age gave way to the more significant Bronze Age. Nowadays, this alloy is still used, famously for casting statues, whilst Copper in its pure form has expanded to many more uses – especially in the age of electricity due to its electrical conductivity – electrical wires, telecommunication cables and digital devices. Copper pipes replaced the water poisoning Lead pipes and although other metals (including Aluminium) are used for electrical wiring, copper is the most widely used – even so the cost of copper is high enough to that its scrap value makes recycling a profitable enterprise and ripping copper pipes out of empty buildings a crime of the desperate or unscrupulous… Copper is also important in the medical field due to its anti-microbial properties and has been shown to increase agricultural yields.

As a Commodity – Copper was the third-most-consumed industrial metal in the world, after iron and aluminium, with an estimated 22m metric tons mined in 2022 rising from 16m metric tons in 2010 and in spite of this increased demand, there is more of the metal available today than at any other time in history according to the Copper Alliance.

The main producing countries of raw copper in 2020 were

Zambia – $5.77bn

Chile – $1.88bn

Namibia – $1.37bn

Bulgaria – $1.01bn

Democratic Republic of the Congo – $710m

Whilst the main importing countries were

China – $5.34bn

Switzerland – $2.3bn

Belgium – $1.29bn

Namibia – $1.18bn

India – $1.03bn

Makes you wonder what the Swiss are doing with all that copper – but that is the kind of unexpected fact you discover when you start to look behind the scenes of all the Commodities we take for granted…

And so to the poem – a Duplex is the invention of Jericho Brown and is known as a gutted sonnet—that is, part ghazal, part blues poem. The duplex is comprised of fourteen lines arranged in couplets, wherein each line is between nine and eleven syllables, the second line of the first couplet is echoed in the first line of the second couplet, and so on, and the first line of the poem is also it’s last. This repetition drives the poem along at a pace, I find…

Copper

What price the copper of a redheaded girl…
Before Bronze, or Iron was the Copper Age

Do copper bracelets ward off old age arthritis?
No copper can catch the thief of time…

Cops were known for wearing a copper badge
Good luck catching thieves of pipes from buildings

The price of copper makes the theft worthwhile
Pipes carry water – wires electricity

Wires construct the web of our digital age
The internet monitors the price of Copper

The price of raw ore and refined metal
Cuprite, Digenite, Malachite, Azurite

The prettiest of these – green Malachite but
What price the copper of a redheaded girl…

One of my favourite songs is by The Incredible String Band – “Red Hair”

Cocoa and a Cento Poem

April 3, 2024April 1, 2024humanist55

Worldwide Trade in Cocoa 2022 $46.4 Billion

Cocoa perhaps above all others, exemplifies the aspect of commodities whereby they are the raw materials for other things that we consume and in the case of cocoa, from which we get chocolate – literally consume! And yet, how many of us know where our chocolate comes from, how it’s raw ingredient is grown or by whom and how it turns into our favourite sweet treat?

If you want the full facts I suggest you go to the Fair Trade Organisation commodity briefin g because they are tireless campaigners for better prices for cocoa producers since of the 4 million tonnes of Cocoa produced each year around the equatorial globe, worth 20.3 billion dollars, 90% of it is grown by 5-6 million small farmers whereby close to 50 million people depend on cocoa production for a living. From them, the product is mainly concentrated into the hands of just 9 companies. But I am going to take a more personal look at the world of Cocoa.

The world of Cocoa production is in crisis at present

Processing plants cannot afford to buy beans
Consumers around the world will have to pay more for chocolate
The market could be heading for a fourth year of deficit

You can read more about it here, but here is the essence – and you might want to stock your cupboards with the sweet stuff…

In normal times, the market is heavily regulated – traders and processors purchase beans from local dealers up to a year in advance at pre-agreed prices. Local regulators then set lower farmgate prices that farmers can charge for beans.
However, in times of shortage like this year, the system breaks down – local dealers often pay farmers a premium to the farmgate price to secure beans.
The dealers then sell the beans on the spot market at higher prices instead of delivering them at pre-agreed prices.
As global traders rush to purchase those beans at any price to meet their obligations with the chocolate firms, local processors are often left short of beans.
Ivorian and Ghanian authorities normally try to protect local plants by issuing them with cheap loans or by limiting volumes of beans that global traders can purchase.
This year, however, plants are not getting the cocoa they pre-ordered and cannot afford to buy at higher spot prices.
Already, chocolate-makers have raised prices. U.S. retail stores charged 11.6% more for chocolate products last year compared with 2022, data from market research firm Circana shows.
The International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) expects global cocoa production will fall by 10.9% to 4.45 million metric tons this season.
Reuters

Talk about ignorance – I can’t remember how old I was before I finally pinned down the relationship between cocoa and chocolate – and it was drinking cocoa and drinking chocolate that forced me to look it up – drinking cocoa is just powdered cocoa and you can make it into a drink or use it as an ingredient in cakes, savoury and other dishes. Drinking chocolate might variously contain. sugar and milk powder to make a sweet chocolate drink.

As a child, in a Western, first-world country, my sisters and I had plenty of chocolate – especially at Easter with Easter eggs. We had white chocolate courtesy of The Milky Bar Kid and we gradually became aware not only of Milk and Dark Chocolate – gradually acquiring a preference for the latter with its more bitter taste – or not. We also started to notice the difference between cheap chocolate that melts in your hand, and the crisper snap of better quality chocolate such as Lindt cast chocolate Easter Bunnies. But it is only in recent years that I have come to understand the whys and wherefores of these different aspects of chocolate.

In 1968, en route back home to England from Australia by ship, we called into Trinidad where a taxi driver took us to a tropical beach with picture postcard palm trees leaning down across the sands and he also stopped at a roadside stall to buy a Cocoa pod. Breaking open the pointy-ended yellow oval pod, he revealed the cocoa beans inside coated in a white flesh which he broke out and gave us to suck. The white flesh was pleasant and slightly like lychee if I recall correctly but bite into the beans and it was a bitter disappointment! Could this be where chocolate came from? The answer is yes but only after considerable processing.

Cocoa pods broken open to show white flesh covered cocoa beans

Jump ahead some 50 years when I worked and still work for a factory that makes a lot of sweet chocolatey cakes and puddings, and I was lucky enough to spend a day at the UK plant of Barry Callebaut AG – the top processer in the world of cocoa yet like all the big processors, with the exception of Nestlé who also make finished chocolate goods, most people in Britain and probably any of the countries where they have plants, will say Barry who? In the UK, the best-known chocolate sweet manufacturer is Cadbury (Bourneville) and in America, the names Hershey, Nestlé and Mars dominate the chocolate market, but I discovered on my day at Barry Callebaut’s that it is they who provide the chocolate to Cadbury – BY THE TANKERFULL!!!!!

Huge 1-ton blocks of cocoa have already been processed by taking the farmer-dried beans, crushing them and melting them slightly into giant blocks. Callebaut then refine the cocoa further into chocolate solids (the principal ingredient of dark chocolate) and cocoa-butter (the principal ingredient of white chocolate) and by mixing in milk solids and sugar, they produce milk chocolate. Most of Callebaut’s output is in the form of tiny pellets of chocolate or the aforementioned tankers of liquid chocolate. They also sell a small amount of “cocoa nibs” – a health supplement and occasional food ingredient and they sell pink chocolate – the product of years of selective breeding.

I also learned why cheap chocolate melts in your hands and expensive doesn’t – it’s all down to the tempering – something I knew of in relation to metals but not chocolate. It costs money to repeatedly heat and cool chocolate until it is tempered hence the greater cost of tempered chocolate, but if you want to cast fine detail and not have it melt in your hand and get a snap when you break it – then temper it you must…

I left Barry Callebaut with a secret yen to become a Chocolatier but I fear that sampling the goods would not be good for my diabetes!

One more personal connection with chocolate – as a student I lived in Birmingham – not far from Bournville the model village set up for its workers by its Quaker founders. Bournville sells chocolate products under the name Cadbury…

Part of Bournville Village showing the Cadbury factory in the background.

And so to the poem which is a kind of “found” poem where I searched for lots of poems referencing cocoa and took lines from them to make a new poem known as a Cento.

Cocoa Poems

To attract you to the front of the store
Chocolate candies abound
In a cocoa river
palate tales abound
What a rich flavour
with hints of cocoa

Make hot cocoa
Black confection triple thick
triple chocolate
I was a Christmas drink almost to sweet to sup
A chocolate star lay at my helm, scrumptiously tasty

Or when it’s cold enjoy warm cocoa
Our fireside chat
to hot cocoa
With one thought in mind…
We enjoy winter, the more
we enjoy cocoa!

In this mug, memories steep
hot chocolate whispers, soft and deep
Carnation instant hot cocoa… my Mom’s treat with a kick of nutrition.
Each morning for one mug, I visit with Mom.
Like a little fur in my Mexican cocoa said my old grandma…
Saw a furry creature sitting in her cocoa cup!

He ordered a cocoa, not expecting anything extra
the smiley face at the top almost changed his mood
Tentative brush of a cheek in a cocoa crush
Knocking back the sepia potion,
Cocoa coursing through their veins.
I miss my cocoa butter kisses,
hope you smile when you listen

This Cento poem incorporates lines from poems by Ilene Bauer, M.L. Kiser, Anne-Lise Andresen, Caren Krutsinger, Heidi Sands, Albert, C. J. Krieger, Billy Ros III, Sara Etgen-Baker, Gwendolyn.Queenofself, Lucia Heffernan, John Betjeman, Stanley J. Sharpless, Keke Davis.

Barley and a Bop Poem

April 2, 2024April 1, 2024humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could there be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…

By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.

The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Barley 2022 $10.4 Billion

Barley is the oldest cultivated grain and still the forth most cultivated after maize, wheat, and rice. Bere was the Old English word for Barley and the word Barley comes from the Old English bærlic. The Old English bere-aern meaning “barley-store” gives us the modern word barn and showing the importance of this ancient grain. Grinding stones near the Sea of Galilee reveal traces of barley starch from 23,000years ago and by 9,000 years ago, domesticated barley (unable to reproduce without human assistance) is found throughout the Fertile Crescent including Mesopotamia, sometimes thought to be the original Garden of Eden.

Botanical illustration of leafy stem with roots, flowers, and 2- and 6-row ears

In 2022, 155 million tonnes of barley were grown worldwide with Russia in the lead at 15% followed by France Germany and Canada. You can read more details about all aspects of Barley here. However, the thing to be concerned about over barley as a commodity is that it is threatened by Climate Change. Modern barley ideally likes a cool climate without too much rain which is perhaps why it enjoys northern continental interiors but even these areas are threatened by the rising temperatures of global warming and the unpredictable extremes of weather events that bring heavy rain to unaccustomed areas…

Barley production – 2022
Country	Millions of tonnes
Russia	23.4
France	11.3
Germany	11.2
Canada	10.0
Turkey	8.5
Spain	7.0
World	154.9^[44]

Seventy percent of barley goes to animal feed which vegetarians would answer is a wasteful way for humans to raise protein, but the other thirty percent is eaten (or drunk) by humans but if climate change disrupts the crop, will animal feed be the first to succumb to unpredictability with humans feeding directly on whatever has managed to be grown?

With barley being eaten in such a wide range of countries, there are many varieties of soups, stews, gruels and porridges not to mention bread made from barley flour. But barley is also fermented to produce malt which is the sugar basis of both many beers and of whisky and these liquids are ascribed as the gifts to mankind of John Barleycorn who was the subject of many ballads variously personifying the harvest and transformation of barley into booze…

Healthwise, a 100-gram portion of barley can provide 10% of the required Daily value of some essential nutrients – fibre, the B vitamin niacin, and dietary minerals, including iron and manganese. It does however contain gluten so it is not suitable for those who are gluten-intolerant. It can aid in the regulation of both blood sugar and blood pressure.

Barley is not the only crop which is and will increasingly suffer from climate change, but it illustrates clearly the coming doom scenario if we fail to act to halt the slide into global warming.

And so to today’s poem – a recently coined form – a Bop poem! The Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver during a summer retreat of the African American poetry organization, Cave Canem. The Poets.org defines the Bop as “The first stanza (six lines long) states the problem, and the second stanza (eight lines long) explores or expands upon the problem. If there is a resolution to the problem, the third stanza (six lines long) finds it. If a substantive resolution cannot be made, then this final stanza documents the attempt and failure to succeed.” So here goes…

Barley

Barley enjoys a cool climate but not too much rain
but global warming also means increased precipitation,
we may have to eschew John Barleycorn’s barley malt
but losing liquor is the least of it if climate change can’t halt.
this oldest of grains is still the fourth most cultivated crop
so food for animals and people around the world might stop.

Animals eat seventy percent of the barley.
Some know only soup with Pearl Barley
but bred to lose its hull is Hull-less Barley
which pre-cooked and dried is Quick Cooking Barley,
longer to cook is only lightly polished Pot Barley,
similar to steel-cut oats are Barley Grits,
and like rolled oats, Barley Flakes are flattened bits
of a grain that’s eaten in so many places
its crop loss with hunger will over-face us.

The third stanza of a Bop poem seeks resolution
but I see no solution to this sad situation,
those traders in stocks and shares
who seek to hedge their bets with grown wares
will find Soft Commodities have and make bad Futures
if we’ve tipped the climate past the point of rupture…

Other Commodities beginning with B include Beef and Bitumen. Beef, as is discussed with Barley above, is the least efficient way of producing protein of all animals since you have to put masses of other protein in to get there and as well, cattle are accused of contributing to greenhouse gasses and thus global warming with all their farting and burping methane. There are some minor measures which are beginning to alleviate those things but more significant is that the demand for beef continues to grow and that means bringing more land into agriculture including forestry. Just because people in developed countries want to eat more meat and don’t directly see the Amazon rainforest being cut down to make way for ranching, does not mean it is not affecting them through climate change. You can read a good article by the World Resources Institute weighing up the factors around beef and the environment here.

Bitumen is a byproduct of refining crude oil – the very last item to come out of fractional distillation and it is of course, the binder in tarmac or asphalt which makes the roads that the petrol-driven motor cars drive on. If bitumen was not used up in this way then it would be a horrendous waste product to be disposed of. So the growth of the motor car and the spreading of roads were pretty much synchronised and conversely, if – and it is a big if – we transition fully to electric vehicles, then the cessation of oil refining will mean a cessation of bitumen availability and considering that electric vehicles will still need roads… As a commodity, bitumen is pretty closely allied to the cost of crude oil and the price of that is a whole other can of worms!

Other poetry forms I might have chosen beginning with B include the Ballad, the Blazon (though it might be difficult to frame Barley as the beloved), Blank Verse, and the Ballat.

Aluminium and an Acrostic Poem

April 1, 2024March 31, 2024humanist55

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – will there be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Aluminium 2022 $280Billion

Happy Bi-Centenary Aluminium!

Yes, Aluminium, or Aluminum as the Americans choose to call it, was first discovered as a metal and element, in 1824, which for the element third most abundant in the earth’s crust after Silicon and Oxygen, is remarkable! Today Aluminium is ubiquitous in industry and domestically, wiring, aeroplane construction, building construction and tin cans are just a few of the obvious uses and because it can be recycled perfectly, it is estimated that so it is estimated that 75% of all the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.

Aluminium is mainly produced from the ore Bauxite which comes primarily from Australia, China and Guinea and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global aluminium output. On average 4-5 tons of bauxite are needed to produce 1 ton of aluminium. It takes a lot of electricity to separate out the metal – about 15 MWH per tonne of output. That’s approximately as much as a 100-apartment block consumes in a month. This is why recycling is very desirable – 1 kg of recycled aluminium cans can save up to 8 kg of bauxite, 4 kg of various fluorides and up to 15 KWH of electricity.

Newly refined, Aluminium is a highly reflective silvery metal but one of its useful properties is that it quickly reacts with oxygen to produce a greyish layer of oxide which then protects the metal from further oxidation.

*Graf Zeppelin* under construction – Wikipedia

Aluminium is light – one-third the density of steel and so it is ideal for building flying machines – the first great example being the great airships of the 1920s but continuing to this day with most aircraft containing large amounts of aluminium – so as one ad for recycling points out, your drink can today may be your holiday jet tomorrow…

In the first years following its discovery, aluminium was hard to produce and so an expensive commodity, two examples of its use are as the cap of The Washington Monument completed in 1895 (due to its electrical conductivity it makes a great lightning conductor) and the statue in London’s Piccadilly Circus is the first to be cast in aluminium – often misnamed as Eros, it is in fact the Greek god of Requited Love – Anteros.

The placing of an aluminium pyramid atop the Washington Monument back when Aluminium was considered a “precious” metal.

On a commercial trading note, the price of Aluminium has been affected by President Biden’s announcement of further sanctions against Russia including trading in metals such as aluminium some of which is produced there, following the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny so even hard commodities can be affected by unexpected events.

Aluminium readily combines with other metals to produce alloys – if your car has alloy wheels for example they are principally aluminium with a small amount of property-altering magnesium. Only one isotope of aluminium is stable – the one we mostly find on Earth, but all other isotopes are radioactive and it is thought that heat from decaying aluminium isotopes helped melt comets in the outer solar system. Aluminium compounds result in the jewels ruby, sapphire, aquamarine and emerald as well as the very hard mineral corundum used for abrasion.

And so to the poem – there are a plethora of poetic forms beginning with A to choose from, Acatalectic, Abecadarian, Aisling, and Aubade, to name but a few. I have chosen an Acrostic where the first letter of each line spells out a word – from the Greek for ‘at the tip of the verse’.

Aluminium

Aluminium your shining
Light was hiding
Under a bushel of chemistry
Mixed so thoroughly
In precious jewels and common sulphates
Never a native metal, but wait
In 1824 your secret was
Unlocked and ever since has
Made our world a lighter brighter place…

I could not leave the letter A without mentioning Amber, once called “the gold of the North” and traded from its main source The Baltic, all the way to the Mediterranean. So one of the earliest forms of international commodity trading!

A to Z 2024 Theme Reveal

March 10, 2024March 17, 2024humanist55

Consider this – you go to your local supermarket to buy, among other things, some orange juice. You find the right section where there are several brands to choose from, fresh in the chiller and long-life too – perhaps a hundred-litre packets all told. That’s just your local shop, imagine how many shops there are in your town or city each with a hundred litres of orange juice on sale at any particular time – and remember, this stock is turning over all the time – being bought and then replaced with stock from the store room. Multiply by the number of cities in your country and then by the number of orange juice-drinking countries in the world and you have imagined an ocean of orange juice! Where does it all come from – especially considering it takes eight oranges to make a litre of juice? Are there enough orange trees in the world to account for all this juice?

Of course, if you believe in Solipsism – then you will think that the world only exists because you imagine it into being and of course, you want to have plenty of orange juice wherever you go, so you imagine it into being present in all those thousands of shops worldwide. I am more of a realist and so I know that there must be enough orange trees to provide the juice – I just have no idea where!

Most people have no idea where all that orange juice comes from either and what about dried mint in all those expensive little jars – you may have holidayed in some sunny spot and seen oranges growing, but when did you ever see a mint farm? These things are Commodities – Soft Commodities in fact – which means they are commodities which are grown as opposed to Hard Commodities like metals which are mined. So this year, I am going to explore the world of Commodities!

Of course, to some people, Commodities as a term, means a form of investment and apparently, if you belong to the stocks and share-owning class, you should, apparently, diversify your share portfolio with commodities for greater stability – though this is well above my pay grade so don’t be expecting any tips! But the essential difference between gambling on stocks and shares and gambling on commodities is that they are subject to different forces of fluctuation – a company might invent a new product and its share value rocket or it might have a product superseded by a rival and plummet. Commodities also go up and down – soft commodities are susceptible to the weather, even shellac – the product of the Lac Fly has good and bad years whilst hard commodities are more predictable.

In case you think that commodities sound rather dry, I am going to include a poem – also with an A to Z progression about each commodity as the last nine months, I have taken to writing poetry in a big way – so a double whammy! A few commodities are missing in the Abercadarian and I will double up on one of the letters and poetry forms.

A Commodity Trader and a Poet contemplating commodities in their own ways…

Whether you come for the poems or the commodities, trust me, there will be amazing facts about gold, amber, pork bellies and yes shellac…

This is my 5th A -Z Challenge and you can find the previous years via the Menu at the top of the page – starting in the fateful year of Covid 2020…
2020 – personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis
2021 – I was trying to complete a sci-fi novel and it advanced me greatly and I finished it shortly afterwards
2022 – I wrote about foods which can be used as an ingredient
2023 – I wrote about phrases we know the meaning of but often, not the origin of – and a s a bonus Cant languages

Six Questions (from Pablo Neruda)

March 8, 2024March 9, 2024humanist55

Over at dVerse Poets Pub Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.

Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful
Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry

Why did I grow up without companions – lonely
compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping
lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless
springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless

How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed
one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied

Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless
Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.

How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still
As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children
Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back
Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again

Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends
Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed

Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common
See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together

There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due
no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”

Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!”
with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”

Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!”
the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…

25% of the yield of a barrel of Crude Oil is Heating Oil and the Crude Oil Market reached a value of US $ 1424.38 Bn. in 2022 so $356.09

A Haiku

Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 BillionWorldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion

Here are some quotes from the CME Group who specialise in Weather Futures:-

Frost

Worldwide trade in Ethanol 2022 $83.5 Billion

Worldwide trade in Copper 2022 $ 304.79

Worldwide Trade in Cocoa 2022 $46.4 Billion

Worldwide Trade in Barley 2022 $10.4 Billion

Worldwide Trade in Aluminium 2022 $280Billion

Happy Bi-Centenary Aluminium!

Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion
Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion