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IS COCOA A CURSE
OR A BLESSING TO GHANA?(1)
By
CAMERON DUODU
July 20, 2016
Once upon a time, it would have
been unimaginable for any Ghanaian to ask whether
cocoa had been a blessing or a curse to his country.
For when I was growing up in the green forest
area of the Eastern Region, where a good percentage
of Ghana's cocoa is grown, it was generally assumed
that cocoa was an unmitigated blessing unto us.
This facile acceptance of cocoa as the gift of
Mother Nature to Ghana, is one of the travesties in
our national life. For the existence of a cocoa
industry in Ghana is entirely due to the diligent
work of men and women!
Cocoa is not even
native to Ghana, but was brought to us from another
West African country – Equatorial Guinea – by a
Ghanaian called Tetteh Quarshie. He was a
Blacksmith, who had gone there to practice his
trade, which, then as now, knew no international
boundaries.
Spanish explorers had come across
– or as the now discredited Eurocentric view of
history would have us believe, “discovered” – cocoa
in Central America and had brought some to their
then colony, Equatorial Guinea, to cultivate. They
used the beans for making a beverage and also, for
creating chocolate. This was how the Aztecs and
other Latin American peoples had used cocoa for
thousands of years before they were conquered by the
Spaniards. (At the time Tetteh Quarshie went there,
however, Equatorial Guinea had passed from Spanish
to Portuguese rule.)
Tetteh Quarshie had to
smuggle his cocoa from the Equatorial Guinea island
of Fernando Po, because the Portuguese had
commercialised the crop and didn't want any
competitors in its production. He took his cocoa to
Mampong-Akwapim, where he planted the first beans in
1879.
Tetteh Quarshie's experiment was
successful, and when the people of the area heard
that cocoa was being purchased by Europeans, they
went to him to buy seeds to go and plant. In just
two decades, cocoa had spread through Ghana's forest
regions. The first exports were shipped to Europe
around 1908.
Volumes exported were 20,000
metric tonnes in 1908;
41,000 metric tonnes by
1911. Exports peaked at 213,000 metric tonnes in the
1930s. The Government of the Gold Coast regarded
cocoa as a godsend, because the farmers could not
export it direct to Europe but needed the
intervention of European firms, who organised the
crop's purchase from the farmers and then shipped it
abroad. To be permitted to do this, the foreign
companies had to surrender part of their receipts
from the crop as “export duty” to the Government.
Very soon, cocoa export duty was fetching the
Government no less than 60% of national revenue, and
and nearly 75% of foreign exchange earnings.
In global terms, Ghana's production hovered around
40% of total world output until about 1980, when
Ghana was overtaken as the largest producer in the
world by her neighbour, the-Ivory Coast.
So,
if Ghana had been benefiting so handsomely from
cocoa production, how could cocoa ever be considered
as a “curse” to her?
The answer is that cocoa
has created an almost permanent tension between the
cocoa farmers of Ghana and their successive
Governments. From the beginning of the industry,
Governmental intervention has prevented the farmers
from maximising their earnings from the crop they
produce. Under colonial rule, foreign merchants were
the only people allowed to buy farmers' produce and
transport it to chocolate factories in Europe and
America. None of the value added that accrued to
cocoa as it was manufactured into expensive
chocolates, reached the farmers. Additionally (as
noted above) a sizable export duty was creamed off
the purchase price by the Government. The farmer
just became a sitting duck, or – to mix metaphors –
a “goose” that laid golden eggs.
The farmers
were obliged to accept whatever price the overseas
merchants decided that raw cocoa was worth.
And
no matter how tint that was, the Government creamed
off a chunk of it.
The farmers regarded this
situation as so unsatisfactory bad that as early as
1924, they embarked on the first of several cocoa
“holdups”, during which they refused to sell any
cocoa to the cocoa merchants.
Many farmers
underwent the traumatic experience of having to burn
their cocoa beans because they had been stored for
so long – unsold – that they had become mouldy and
thereby unsalable.
Despite the futility – and
humiliation – that characterised the 1924 boycott,
the farmers felt so cheated that they again embarked
on another boycott in the crop season of 1930-1931.
And once more in 1937-38!
But all these
boycotts failed to move the cocoa merchants. That
was when the idea that cocoa might be a “curse” to
Ghana began to gain ground. Why a curse? A curse
because you used your labour and your land top
cultivate the cocoa crop.
You also used labour to
harvest the crop, dry it in the sun )without
allowing rainfall to ever wet the beans, as they
would be ruined if they got wet. And yet you never
knew exactly how much you would get for the crop!
Until the “cocoa-purchase price” was announced in
Accra!
The maintenance of this system whereby
the Government and the foreign cocoa merchants held
all the cards was certainly was one of the planks
that antagonised the farmers against Ghana's first
African Government Ghana formed by Dr Kwame Nkrumah,
as Leader of government Business, in 1951. Dr
Nkrumah was obliged to use a British Minister of
Finance, and he soon found out that the country's
budget was so intricately dependent on the price
paid to cocoa farmers that he could not drastically
alter the price – even if he wanted to.
Her
had been making anti-colonial speeches during the
political rallies he held before being imprisoned,
and the cocoa farmers had assumed that he would
dismantle the system – akin to economic slavery –
under which they operated. But even after K A
Gbedemah had become the Minister of Finance, the
system was not dismantled. Indeed, the Government
began to raid, to finance development projects, the
funds accumulated by the “Cocoa Marketing Board” as
reserves that were ostensibly meant to augment the
price paid to farmers, if and when the world price
of cocoa fell too low!
Instead, Dr Nkrumah
resorted to the use of words to solve the problem,
For instance, he “fixed” the cocoa price at a
certain level, and promised that he would not change
the price even if the world price went down.
Unfortunately for him, the world price actually went
up after he had fixed the price! The farmers
thereupon demanded that he pay them the difference
between the fixed price and the new world price. He
did not.
So, eventually, Dr Nkrumah, who had
been regarded as a hero by the farmers whilst he was
leading the national political campaign against the
British, became as guilty – in the eyes of the cocoa
farmers – of cheating them just as the British did.
By 1954, Dr Nkrumah was facing a widespread
revolt by cocoa farmers in Ashanti and the Eastern
Region, which was seized upon by his political
opponents as the main plank of the party they formed
to oppose the CPP: the National Liberation Movement
(NLM). So, cocoa was largely the cause of the first
major split in the Ghanaian nationalist front.
It is easy to see that Ghana has never quite
recovered from that initial political schism, if
truth be told. Therefore “cocoa curse number one” is
the division of our nationalist front that once
submerged, to a very large extent. the ethnic and
class divisions that dogged Ghanaian society. You
only have to read some of the rants on the “Say It
Loud” section of Ghanaweb to realise how deep and
nasty these social divisions have become.
Unconsciously the ranters are railing against the
perceived cheating carried out by those charged with
administering our nation's resources. And since
cocoa money forms a large part of the Government
revenue that's being filched cocoa has to be placed
at the centre of the issues that threaten our
national unity.
(To be continued)
--
www.cameronduodu.com
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