NTOABOMA — Chocolate means little to my grandmother. In fact, growing up in the average village that was Ntoaboma in the middle of the country now called Ghana, I knew little of the sugar induced accoutrement of uppity ritual myself. I always received gifts throughout the year – especially when one of my grandparents would return from a journey of about two to ten days away from Ntoaboma. As a child, it felt like lightyears. I would receive new pants, new shirts and new talismans of Krobo beads, when they returned.
Agbelikaklo, Kose, Kelewele and Chofee were, of course, the delicacies I grew increasingly accustomed to from my grandparents’ travels. And when anyone asked me what they should get me from anywhere around the globe, I was sure to affirm my utmost distaste for anything else. These special gifts meant the world to me. I was five. But never, ever, in my good memory did I receive a gift in chocolates. I never had the chance to refuse it. Plus, I wouldn’t have known what it was.
Which brings me to the day my granduncle, my grandmother’s younger brother, who had not been seen around the village for almost seven years suddenly returned with the pods. It was cocoa. He had become a formidable farmer of the crop in a town some hundreds of kilometers south of Ntoaboma, called Forifori. Little did we know he had made a lovely life for himself. Although Forifori was not even four hundred kilometers away, seven years is how long it can take anyone to find a member of the extended family if they decided to lose themselves amongst the cocoa trees.
Alas, what are these pods? I knew even at my young age that these things were not the correct accoutrements. My grandfather would have preferred a Kente cloth, some finely refined Akpeteshie, with matching hats and scarves, facial hair and a good rain on his cocoyam and cassava farm. Anyway, the pods were accepted as a token of appreciation as a traditional man accepts a leopard skin from another brave man who has spent weeks in the forest hunting the dangerous but fine beast.
But essentially that is how the cocoa pods were received. Like it was a leopard’s skin. My grandfather joked, “This is a fine ‘leopard skin’ and what’s in it?”
It took another twenty years, and the death of my lovely grandfather, the death of my great grandmother (who I terribly miss) and the death of this granduncle of mine from Forifori to finally understand the content and import of my grandfather’s comment.
This year, the global chocolate market will be worth 98.3 billion dollars and my village Ntoaboma would have had a hand in it – notably my granduncle and his children who still farm the crop across the terrain in the Afram Plain regions of Ghana. In the 2015 season, Ghana produced 200,000 metric tons less than the 2014 season of 900,000 tons. On average Ghana produces for exports about 800,000 tons of cocoa each year.
The next question is obvious. How much do Ghanaian famers, like my cousins in Forifori, make from these crops? The Minister of Finance, Mr. Seth Terkper, paid GH₵345 per bag of 64kg gross for the 2015 cocoa season which translates into a GH₵3,392 (1,407 dollars) per ton, while across the border in La Cote d’Ivoire, where about 1.5 million tons of cocoa are produced for the world market every year, farmers there receive a minimum price of 750 CFA francs per kilogram (1,540 dollars per ton).
Put together, if Ghana’s farmers rake in 1.13 billion dollars a year, for a nation that produces about twenty-one percent of the world’s cocoa, which is used to produce Chocolates, our farmers can only expect to see 1.2 percent of the global revenue. Refreshing indeed!
In 2015, Mr. Seth Terkper announced that cocoa, together with a few other cash crops, account for more than seventy-five percent of our agriculture sector. This number puts our food production into an interesting perspective. The livelihoods of about eight million Ghanaians (that is about thirty percent of the population) depend on the cocoa sector.
That is, eight million Ghanaians depend on other countries that make chocolate!
What must we do in the meantime in order to live while that part of the world manufactures chocolate? What must we do while the makers of chocolate turn a profit? What must these eight million Ghanaians eat in the mean time? How must they pay for their healthcare and education?
The Ghanaian government has been convinced by western experts that cocoa exports are key in poverty reduction: with surveys conducted in 1991, 1999 and 2005 indicating a reduction in poverty levels among cocoa producing households from 60.1 percent in the 1990s to 23.9 percent in 2005. Against the national poverty rate, which fell from 51.7 percent in 1992 to 28.5 percent in 2006, the number looks good.
For this reason, some researchers insist that the sudden decrease in poverty levels in Ghana for cocoa producers coincided with a period of favorable cocoa prices, higher yields and increased production.
But cocoa exports account for only 8.2 percent of Ghana’s GDP. That means that Ghana made only 5.7 billion dollars from cocoa. That stands at a paltry 5.8 percent of all what the chocolate industry is worth, although Ghana produces twenty-one percent of its cocoa. Fascinating!
So how come for a crop that contributes only 8.2 percent towards our GDP we dedicate more than seventy-five percent of our arable lands towards its cultivation? How come for a crop that takes up seventy-five percent of our farmlands and is not consumed in Ghana or any part of Africa, we invest so many resources in its production?
The answer lies in all of those prism-shaped Toblerone bars in airport duty free shops across the world to the more local Cailler and Frey varieties. Every year, the Swiss people consume on average just under twenty lbs of chocolate per person. The United States struggles to compete with Europe in the chocolate consumption league and it comes in ninth overall – the average American eats about 9.5 lbs of chocolate each year.
So, of course, chocolate means many things to these people in the west: it can be a special treat, a guilty pleasure or a delicacy to be mulled and evaluated much like wine. But for many people in Ghana, it’s a strange industry with very little return on the investment. Many Ghanaian children have barely had a cold drink of chocolate in their entire childhood lives.
I never had one. Even my granduncle – the cocoa farmer – never had one and he died.
Hence, for all the resources we pour into producing this crop, and the little we receive from it, it beats no mind to consider what a Slave Sugarcane Plantation might look like in the twenty-first century. Ghana and La Cote d’Ivoire are cocoa plantations alright producing a crop the only goes to satisfy the chocoholics of the West—in the same way the Americas were used, with the forced labor of brutally enslaved Africans, to produce the sugar for western habits.
Nestlé was recently embroiled in a new controversy as the company went public with the admission that slave labor had been found in the multinational company’s supply chain in La Cote d’Ivoire on several cocoa producing plantations.
In Ghana, the impact is clear. Even the road from Forifori to Ntoaboma, which is why my granduncle could vanish for seven years, cannot be paved adequately without selling these cocoa beans to these nations in the West in return for foreign reserves before we can pay people in Ghana to come and work on a feeder road.
This kind of economic thinking – a European economic paradigm meant to keep Forifori enslaved on a plantation to satiate western gluttony – cannot afford Ghana the opportunity to grow and become sustainable. The numbers described every year in Ghana’s Budget, a pachydermatous script, are bafflingly interesting, but they are as treacherous as the old Baluba proverb that is: The skin of the leopard is beautiful, but not its heart.
These western nations, no matter how they slice and dice the issue surrounding poverty reduction in Ghana – which we can amply do without committing our resources to cocoa production – are not interested in Ghana’s economic development and her subsequent sustainability. They are leopards gallivanting the continent for prey. And they come thumping some very ugly, heavy hearts about cocoa production.
The pod my granduncle brought back from Forifori, which my grandfather branded as ‘leopard skin,’ speaks to this reality.
It turns out that my grandfather’s joke, after all, was a serious one. In fact, it was an inquisition – an inquiry into the stupidity of the economic minds in Africa, the garrulity of Ghanaian policy makers, and with it, the pettifoggery of western experts.
My grandfather would have made a fine adviser to the president of Ghana, but alas, his children were taken from him at an early age by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and colonially schooled to become doctorate degree holders in economics. “Whatever that means,” my grandfather would say, and he would finish it off with: “Whatever puts food on the table and a roof over your free head. Go on, idiots!”
Culturally, this piece is well situated within the African mind and the African struggle. The ‘pettifoggery’ of western education and economic policy making in Africa is at its highest and most aggressive! Sad, that our children will turn out to pout Marx, Smith, etc. without this kind of footing in the African Common Sense – the sort Narmer’s grandfather seems to have plenty of. Sad that such a man didn’t get to rule our nation but Kotoka and Afrifa did! How sad! I hope Mr Seth Terkper with his squinty face reads all of this, and thinks about it well and fast. Such nincompoops need to be removed from public office immediately. They have no clue. They lack common sense so how can they lead the common people? Thanks for another refreshing piece. These things are sadly rare in African news.
This is is a refreshing piece about the cocoa industry in Ghana. It’s flows, it’s straight to point and truth, and it’s smooth. It must be read by everyone who gives a damn!
Ive always understood this cocoa madness as an extention of colonisation… “Many Ghanaian children have barely had a cold drink of chocolate in their entire childhood lives”. that says it all. A cornerstone of slef hate…
It’s really the extension of the Sugar-cane Plantations of yester-year of the Americas!
of course…. but this one is even worse because we are proud of it when noone is standing on our backs on a horseback with a whip
Correct! We are very proud: see Terkper announce new cocoa prices each year with a smile on his face. See Ghanaian children talk about Ghana’s exports – cocoa and gold – with a smile on their faces. They’ve been taught! They’ve been lobotomized. It’s an emasculation par excellence!
The interesting psychological apsect of it which I always ask myself “why cant they this?”, is that after happily announcing the prices, they alway come back within a month to discuss problems due to changes in europe (what they call world market).
Hahahahaa… World Market indeed! Our leaders are the House Negroes (or Negro Heads of the Plantation). The quicker we understood this the better it will be for our Freedom and our Democracy.
When it come to oil, cooa and gold…. African leaders can blame this so called world market so quick that u have to sometimes burry your head in disgust…
It’s telling what we allow our leaders to do to us everyday. It’s telling what we make them get away with. It’s telling what we have become in 400 years! It’s very telling how we have refused to think. Which all together makes me think we have actually lost who we are, forever, perhaps!
I have lived on a Cocoa Farm. I have worked on goldmining projects. Yes, the indigenous African people are not compensated with their due. The question is: what are the alternatives WE propose?
Dade Afre Akufu that’s the thing. People think Ghana is a peaceful country when we are actually just pacified by colonial instrumentalisation. Both means you dont resort to violence but the former is a conscious decision to make while the latter means you are scared of angering some people north of the planet earth somewhere in the snow. I wish I had time to do a piece about this… “Conscious Nonviolence versus Colonial Pacifism”
Jesus! If you don’t do it, who will? Yesu. At this point in our lives, we need to become the workhouses. Our children should look back and say: waaooooo!!!!!
Good read. Have to be a bit critical here guys. I wholly agree with the article but if your entire economy is based on exporting commodities the powers that be will always have the leg up.
Good article but no ideas or solutions were offered up to change the status quo. The powers that be have no interest in reducing poverty in the West let alone Africa. The global capitalist could care less how much the Chinese factory worker gets paid or the Ghana farmer makes as long as it’s cheap enough to make significant returns. So unless you make significant and systemic changes, trust and believe that not only will nothing change it will actually get worse.
“Insanity: Doing the same things and expecting different results”. Einstein.
Is the writer suggesting that these farmers should grow other crops which could be more profitable? Should Ghana shrink its production?
What happens is nothing changes, the status quo remains but somehow people long for things to change.
I think the essence of the article is to point out how this will never benefit Ghana, which if we understand will inevitably lead to a change in attitude towards the system.
Ares Mars, thanks for reading as always! And thanks for being your critical self, this is extremely valuable.
Now, I think I offered a significant paradigm shift, although I might have not stated that point in clear, concise and straightforward terms. That of bringing to a halt the farming of COCOA. There’s nothing to be gained in producing a luxury crop for Europe where those same farmers cry hungry!
What is to be gained? Technological advancement? We’ve seen none! Poverty reduction? Well, that is the point often made and buttressed by some interesting stats. Generally speaking, more and more people, not just cocoa farmers in Ghana are escaping poverty. It’s no magic of the price of cocoa on the ‘world market’.
But let me address the large issue here – poverty. In plain terms, this is food, shelter and education. All of which can be achieved by farming food! Africa never exported an ounce of cocoa before European traders arrived on our coasts, and they didn’t have poverty – they fed themselves, clothed themselves and built their own homes. If they, some 600 years ago, without western education, without the cash crop that cocoa is, could be self sufficient through farming and fishing, I see absolutely no reason, why producing cocoa has any place in the African society.
Now, unless of course it had a direct impact. But it has not. It never did.
Your last sentence: that’s what we should focus on. Success should not mean exporting to the west or having iPad. as long as I eat, cloth well can read my history, I’m mathematically sound to calculate my income and expenditure, I have every right to say I’m successful
Beautiful! And that is the supreme point!
After reading several posts by this very articulate and thoughtful author, I must admit I have some trepidation about leaving a reply. I am a white American, Episcopal Christian, intermediate school teacher (I teach Culinary Arts to 8th graders), and I have serious doubts that anything I might say will be well received here. However, I am more concerned with the problem of human beings who have, at their fingertips, more opportunities than ever in our history to learn from each other and to solve problems together, but instead choose dissension and hate, so here I go.
I became aware of the unspeakable poverty of cocoa farmers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire – and the child labor that results from that poverty – about four years ago when I began writing a unit on chocolate. It was not lost on me that these countries together produce most of the world’s cocoa, without which we could not have chocolate, and that the economic reality is simply inequitable. Since that time, I have been challenging my students with the ethics of enjoying chocolate in the fervid hope we can become part of what must be a multifaceted solution. I teach the basics of supply chain and the law of supply and demand, we take a look at what it’s like to live in rural West Africa, we examine the practices that bring cocoa from the plantation to the factories, and we evaluate the fairness of the market. In the end, I teach my students the importance of empathy and the power of voting with their dollars. American companies will not make what consumers will not buy.
Perhaps, it’s just a drop in the bucket and from and unwelcome source, as well. Nevertheless, I want it to be known that some of us chocolate consumers possess a conscience as well as a palate for the lovely flavor cocoa can produce.
Kendall Marrow! I do hope that one day the children you are teaching are able to confront the machine that continues to perpetrate these atrocities in the rest of the world, out of sight from the chocolate eating western world. But I have serious doubts. Why? The prevailing way of thought: that we must continue to find a sustainable way of doing something when the doing of that very thing is pernicious to some today and will be until that sustainable way is found. If you consider for instance the cocoa producing issue, it mimics all other aspects of our “THIRD” world living – in which we must produce to satisfy the ever growing world market. Whose market, you would ask? Not Ghana’s. Not West Africa’s. But all markets other than our own. And if we refuse, well, the masters of technology have a giant Atomic Bomb pointed at us. Better yet, they can implant civil war over land rights for farming cocoa among are several diverse ethnicities. Those of us in the “THIRD” world do feel like we live on a plantation, and in an bid to escape now, are told instead to wait until one day – by the dint of hoping in a day – that today’s children will learn to do right. But do they ever? Thirty years ago, this same story run, and the same hope was drummed. We are yet to feel change. Any change! At all.
If Ghana ceases to produce cocoa, there would be no argument from me as to why people there might make that decision. I tell my students, “No one NEEDS chocolate, so if we are going to have it, it should be ethically produced.” I understand your cynicism regarding change. It has all moved along too slowly. I simply wanted to say that painting an entire continent of people with one brush loaded in one ugly color does not contribute toward making things better. As for our part, there will be no atom bombs dropped by Americans over cocoa production. Perhaps, the economic movers and shakers, who now have a very powerful crony in Donald Trump, could cause economic chaos, however. And that could have some of the same horrific effects.
This piece does not have a point. It offers no solutions and no ideas, it is simply another article working to undermine the Ghanaian and other African governments. You take no position except, “pitiful Africa”. It even frames the idea of producing products for Western consumption as bad. No, that is called an export commodity. Saudi Arabia does when with it’s export of oil. The only difference between oil and cocoa is that Cote d’Ivoire and Brazil ramped up cocoa production in the late 1970’s which killed the commodity price and hence the cocoa market, introducing poverty – you omit this. Also you omit that Ghanaian cocoa farmers were very well paid in the 1970’s due to the low world supply. You imply that Ghanaian leaders are foolish for dedicating 75% of their land for exports. What economic theory supports decreasing exports? Trade imbalance theory? Sad that in the 21st century, yet another intellectual is working to call his own people “slaves” – then probably complain when people make fun of African countries. You are not qualified to write this article. A few out-of-context facts does not save your article, lacking perspective written like a fiction novel, a category that suits it well.
Daddy, you first say this: “… Cote d’Ivoire and Brazil ramped up cocoa production in the late 1970’s which killed the commodity price and hence the cocoa market, introducing poverty – you omit this.”
That point, which you made rather well although without realizing that it is exactly what the article is all about, is poignant. Cocoa has been dead since the 70s, the price stinks, so why spend precious resources producing a stinky export product when Ghana could be growing food straight from the ground. But since your understanding, or shall I say intellect is too short to see over the fence, you contradict yourself even further in the ensuing sentence.
You say: “You imply that Ghanaian leaders are foolish for dedicating 75% of their land for exports. What economic theory supports decreasing exports? Trade imbalance theory?”
Now, obviously when you spend 75 percent of your land farming a poverty inducing product for export like cocoa, you’ve got only to be foolish. More, you have to be an idiot really! It is exactly this idiocy that the article addresses, and it is exactly that trade imbalance, which is made clear by using 75 percent of our arable lands to produce a stinky product, that this article addressed. Obviously, this article addresses idiots like yourself.
“… when Ghana could be growing food straight from the ground.” Cocoa is often grown with other crops. Cocoa is often shade grown in mountainous regions. Like I stated, your article is not specific. What crop can replace cocoa, spinach are the other crops that are grown on cocoa farms, Will the new crop require cutting down the rainforest canopy under which cocoa trees grow to introduce sunlight?
From what I understand, your basic complaint, is the price of exports. I don’t know what you mean by “stinky”, please be clear. If the problem is a low price, then raise the price of the export! That simple. Do you know the cocoa process? The majority of the cocoa process is mechanical and standardized, it is only the final stages where flavor is added where differences in the end product chocolate begin to arise. In theory Ghana could commandeer the early processing stages, add value, and receive a higher price for exports. There are only two impediments, 1. Machinery, the winnowing process has to be very efficient 99%. This is where Ghana could focus research to make their winnowing process supreme. 2. The Ghana brand is weak meaning that people would rather pay more money for the same exact product made in Switzerland, why? Because they only associate Africa and Ghana with negativity…”slaves”, “corrupt leaders”, bad hombres, etc. While Switzerland is seen as “pure”, “clean”, and “well-organized” because no Swiss citizen goes on the internet and attacks his government for profiting from stolen funds in Swiss bank accounts. No one wants to associate with something with a bad image, so when you call your countrymen idiots instead of trying to reach a compromise by engaging in civil discourse you are in fact hurting yourself. These are the basic civil society behaviors many Africans do not understand because of selfishness.
Additionally, your “let’s grow local, for local consumption” is a nice idea, but it has failed many times. Samuel Doe introduced it in Liberia, Thomas Sankara introduced it in Burkina Faso to the extent of only wearing local clothing from local cotton, Acheampong tried it in Ghana, etc. It never worked well. You never stated what sets your ideas apart from these other leaders who failed to win support for their policies.