Ghana`s cocoa farms and hypocrisy of the west

SO THE Western countries of the West have threatened to stop buying our cocoa because they think we use child labour to produce the commodity.

The other day, there was the Minister of Finance, Honourable Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, telling us how he was confronted in far-away United States of America over the issue.

According to him, the Americans he met told him that the implements used in cultivating cocoa cut off the fingers of the children.

Secondly, because we use child labour, according to their fevered imagination and monumental ignorance, children had no chance of going to school.

Mr. Baah-Wiredu said he held up his own hands to show that, though he had been a farm boy, he had not lost any of his fingers. Further more, school enrolment all over the country had gone up because of the Capitation Grant and school feeding programme. Whether his audience was convinced, he did not say.

Because we are scientifically technologically, militarily and economically backward, the countries of the West, notably Britain, France, Portugal, The Netherlands and Belgium continue to preach to us while conveniently forgetting their own criminal past.

Sometimes, some of our own people create the wrong impression that those countries built, and continue to build, their economies by working hard. That assertion is only partly true.

The socio-economic history of Britain, for example is a sordid history of the shamefully shameless exploitation of child labour in the homes of the rich, in the coal mines and on the factory floor.

British chimneys were too narrow for adults to climb up ands sweep away the soot. Consequently, little children were employed. A number of them suffered the displacement of their knee-caps because of the method they had to use to climb up the chimneys.

With the coming of the Industrial revolution in Britain, whole families including fathers, mothers and children worked long hours in the coal-mines at starvation wages and in the factories that were dimly-lit and without any safety measures. The conditions under which they lived were very appalling.

These Western countries mentioned above built their economies largely by shamelessly exploiting peoples in Africa, Asia, the pacific and the Americans.

In their book, AID: RHETHORIC AND REALITY, Teresa Hayter and Catherine Whatson write, “Over the last four centuries, a situation of massive world inequality has become established.”

They go on, “A few countries, mainly in Europe and North America , appropriate a proportion of the world's wealth which is totally unrelated to the size of their population. They have achieved this situation not just by using their own resources, productive skills and efforts, but by appropriating those of the rest of the world on a massive and unprecedented scale, and by methods which have had little to do with fair exchange and more to do with plunder, loot and military might.”

First, four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade contributed largely to the building of the economies of these countries and that of North America .

The old slavery was replaced by a new one in which these countries carved up Africa and the rest of the world and brought them under colonial rule for the sole purpose of exploiting the human and natural resources of these lands.

The Scramble for Africa saw these Western European countries establishing spheres of economic and political Influence.

The whole of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) belonged to the Belgian King. Africans were forced to gather rubber for the Belgians. The book, RED RUBBER, tells the story of how Africans in the Congo who could not gather enough rubber to satisfy the white masters had their hands cut off.

At the time of Congo 's independence, the number of educated people was hopelessly low, there were no doctors and the highest ranking army officer was Joseph Desire Mobutu with the rank of sergeant. That was contrary to the falsehood that the colonial master was carefully preparing the subject people for independence.

The NEW INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINES history of the world (issue No. 196 of June 1989) has this entry: “Europeans saw their tropical dependencies as mere suppliers of raw materials. This was why farmers in Mozambique and Angola were forced to stop growing food for local people, and start growing cotton to feed the textile industry in Portugal .”Part of the article also states, “Despite all h rhetoric about civilizing and educating the natives, every European power treated its colonies in much the same manner-as a way of transferring wealth from Africa to Europe .”

We In the Gold Coast became famous as the world's leading producer of cocoa. Our system was, and still is, not the plantation system but small family holdings.

Husband, wife, children and neighbours helped in the production of cocoa beans. The colonial master could not have pretended not to know that the children in the families helped on the cocoa farms and on food farms.

For those of us brought up in the villages, helping our parents and uncles and grandparents to produce food and cash crops was the normal thing. That is how many of us learnt to plant cash crops like cocoa and cotton to feed the factories of Britain and the rest of Europe .

Working on the farm did not necessarily stop some of us from going to school.

Any tool or implement or machine used in doing something may cause injury. Is it not the case that injuries can occur when the sophisticated farm tools are used on European farms?

If there is incontrovertible evidence that some cocoa farmers exploit other people's children and stop them from going to school, that evidence must be produced instead of the simplistic and contentious assumption that we must be exploiting our children on the cocoa farms.

For centuries, Western Europeans have shockingly and criminally exploited us in the form of slavery, pillage, colonialism, exploitation, expropriation of rich farm lands, killing of those who dared open their mouths in protest, yet they can hypocritically and annoyingly preach to us on so- called best practices.

The Western countries have no right to take the moral high ground, especially when they still exploit through so-called aid, through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and through dubious economic arrangements that result in stealing our wealth. They give us one American dollar in so-called aid, loans or grants and take back about three American dollars.

They still exploit us without shame after all those centuries of under-developing our lands.

Can't they leave us alone?