A Bitter Aftertaste

A Ghanaian friend sent me information about an interesting project, started in her country a few years ago by a young Japanese woman. My friend thought it was exactly the sort of project I would support (she knows I am keen to encourage projects that involve farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa). I did find it very positive and interesting.

You probably know that Ghana, based on the West African coast, is a major producer of cocoa beans – also called cacao beans – the key ingredient in chocolate. It is the second largest producer in the world, after its neighbour, Ivory Coast. The total population of the country is about 35 million people; farming dominates the agenda. About four million people work in the cocoa business - growers, collectors, millers, retailers, wholesalers, exporters.

Cocoa production and exports form the bulk of the foreign currency earned by Ghana. The country is seriously in debt to the international financial community (World Bank, IMF, African Development Bank, others) to the tune of just over 43 billion dollars. The government does what it can therefore to promote the production and export of the beans.

Some of the country's 850,000 cocoa farmers make less than a dollar a day, and it is a struggle to make ends meet. That is virtually slave wages.

Four years ago, a young Japanese woman by the name of Taguchi Ai, reading about these challenges, decided that she would start her own project to support a few of those farmers. She chose the village of Amanfrom, in the Volta region. Her first point of contact there was a farmer called Kofi, who acted as interpreter for the others and served as their leader. Taguchi passed on what she had learned from cocoa farmers in other countries and the quality of the beans grown in the village started to improve.

Taguchi then used crowdfunding to raise money to build a chocolate factory, not in Japan but in Amanfro. Here the local cocoa beans are made into high-end chocolate which is then sold to chocolate lovers in Japan – and the profits are returned to the village.

At first glance this seems probably to be the right way to improve the livelihoods of the farmers. Make them become better at what they are already good at. Sounds very much the sort of thing we should be supporting. It’s what economists tell us we should encourage poor people to do.

But then questions start to come to mind.

What will the foreign currency Ghana receives from the sales be spent on? Well, it is very seriously in debt to the international community as we saw above. It will have to repay those debts. It currently spends just short of 45% of its national budget on interest incurred on those debts. It spends only 2% of its national budget on health and 3.3 % on education for the entire country.

The country also needs to spend on importing crucial medicines, it needs oil to keep the main economic activities going, arms for its military and police, maintenance of its international obligations – it has embassies around the world. In other words, it simply must survive, as a small country, in a world that has been developed without account of its needs.

Ghana has little left to purchase food from countries that have surplus food to sell. Its poorest citizens, inevitably the small farmers who are trying to grow food for themselves and their families, are as a consequence becoming poorer and sliding into starvation.