A Chocolate Shortage May Be Imminent and I’m Scared

Hold me. Please, just hold me and tell me everything will be okay. Tell me that the world will always have an abundance of chocolate. A chocolate cakeless, fudgeless, and cocoaless world would be too much to bear.

It seems the world is eating more chocolate than ever and production can't keep up with demand. To make matters worse, drought and a fungal disease known as frosty pod has made growing conditions going forward that much more difficult.

According to the Washington Post, the world consumed 70,000 metric tons more chocolate than was produced and in just five years it could be a million metric tons more (which begs the question-- is there some chocolate Fort Knox whose reserves we're pulling from!?).

There is a silver lining (I almost wrote "brown lining" as a play on chocolate but that sounds terribly wrong): scientists are working on a cocoa tree that can produce seven times more beans than current cocoa trees. More Ovaltine, please!