This Valentines day, Americans gifted each other in the order of 58 million pounds of chocolate, much of it wrapped in 36 million heart-shaped boxes. It was a particularly busy period for the global chocolate industry, which in 2020 processed c. 5 million tons of cocoa beans into chocolate confectionary, generating around 130 billion dollars in revenue. The cocoa-chocolate business is an agro-industrial complex that has emerged from millennia of human ingenuity and entrepreneurship mixed with commerce, political power and violence. At the front end are well known chocolate brands, the likes of Cadbury, Mars, Lindt and so on. Behind them are the grinder-traders, giant agro-industrial trading corporations like Cargill. There would be no chocolate, however, without the cocoa beans and they are grown overwhelmingly on small peasant plantations, most no larger than 3 hectares, yielding 300-400 kg in beans per hectare and worked by c. 6 million farming families. Together with their families, perhaps 50 million people are directly involved in cocoa cultivation and processing, including many youths and children. A rough calculation suggests that the cocoa-farming dependent population worldwide outnumbers the entire farming population of the United States and Europe. At 14 million the main workforce on the cocoa farms significantly outnumbers the 9 million workers engaged in motor vehicle production worldwide.