Study Predicts Déjà-Vu

The reported research-based prediction by the Colombia, South America-based Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) that in another generation cocoa-producing economies like Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria would experience a dramatic decline, as a result of global warming, or the increase in world temperature, could easily have been undertaken by the Akyem-Tafo-based former West-African Cocoa Research Institute (WACRI), now simply known in Ghana as the Cocoa Research Institute (CRI) (See “Study Predicts Doom and Gloom for Ghana's Cocoa” 9/29/11).

Those of us whose families have been at the forefront of the cocoa-growing industry since the 1880s, when the immortalized Mr. Tetteh Quarshie (or Kwasi) returned from Equatorial Guinea with a few pods of the proverbial “Golden Beans,” have since long experienced a dramatic decline in cocoa production, even as seasonal bumper harvests of the crop drifted north into the Asante and Brong-Ahafo regions, and shortly thereafter the Western region and the Ivory Coast.

What is clear, however, is the fact that long before the focus shifted from black-pod and swollen-shoot diseases, it had been clearly recognized by cocoa farmers in Ghana's Eastern Region, in particular, that the Amazon Basin-originated plant was a crop that steadily and rapidly depleted soil nutrients. The fact that cocoa, later massively cultivated and adopted as a cash crop by Africans and the South Americans, primarily dictated by the taste-buds of Western colonial imperialists, had also literally doomed many a Third-World economy into a lopsided division of labor that has both remarkably hampered food production, agricultural diversity and even agro-based industrial development.

And so it was rather sadly amusing to read the following paragraph from the aforementioned news report: “More than half of the world's chocolate comes from the cocoa plantations of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, where hundreds of thousands of small holder farmers supply lucrative Fair-trade (Emphasis appears in the original) markets in developed countries.”

As I read the foregoing quote, naturally, I could not help but wonder whether the reported study by the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture had not been under-written by some generous, albeit self-interested Western donor government or organization with vested interest in this cardinal commercial commodity. Indeed, the Western end of the cocoa trade may well be fair vis-à-vis the prices which the latter pays its primarily Third World-based producers. However, with many of these small-scale cocoa farmers nearly hermetically locked into a system of monopsony, in which their governments exploitatively control the producer prices, with most of the profits going into largely subsidizing the lavish lifestyles of government officials and their cronies, the question of whether, indeed, cocoa farming is a lucrative enterprise for the farmers themselves becomes, at best, a simple matter of relativity and, at the worst, wickedly speculative.

But that the release of the study comes just within days of the passing of Kenya's great environmental activist, scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai (1940-2011), is the kind of tribute that ought to be marked up for a grand celebration by the African Union, instead of making exaggerated capital out of the speculative birthday anniversaries of irredeemable megalomaniacs and inexorable dictators.

But that the study predicting a major economic disaster of apocalyptic proportions for cocoa production in the West African sub-region makes Dr. Maathai's zealous advocacy of “Biodiversity” for nearly forty years imperative, of course, cannot be gainsaid. Still, even more tragic is the fact that such study had not been undertaken by cutting-edge scholars and scientists in such major cocoa-producing West African countries as Ghana, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast. What the foregoing clearly points to is the imperative, and immediate, need for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to establish a sub-region-wide institute for the purpose. This, of course, depends on how serious and progressive the respective governments in the three major West African cocoa-producing countries demonstrate themselves to be.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].