WHY GHANA IS COCOA….. AND COCOA IS GHANA

Ghana is an agricultural nation with more than half of its population engaged in Agric production. It is blessed with several natural resources, including; gold, bauxite, diamond, timber, and recently oil. In Ghana, several cash crops are grown including oil palm, rubber, and our own heritage crop cocoa.

Cocoa is the most important agricultural commodity Ghana produces and the mainstay of Ghana's economy. Cocoa is Ghana's second leading foreign exchange earner, worth about 30 percent of all revenue from export and responsible for about 57 percent of overall agricultural export. The sector directly and indirectly employs about 2 million people, and constitutes a large chunk of Ghana's GDP (8.1 percent in 2006).

But interestingly, cocoa is not very much of a celebrated crop, compared to other commodities, and this is evident in the following narration. On 15th December 2010, when President Mills ceremonially turned on the taps for the flow of Ghana's first commercially produced oil, former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration GIMPA, Prof. Stephen Addei, uttered the following words in an interview with Accra based radio station Citi FM: “Today is as significant as the day Tetteh Quarshie brought cocoa to Ghana. It is a milestone in our economic development.”

Now, if the production of the first commercially produced oil is as significant as the introduction of cocoa into Ghana as Prof. Addei emphasizes, then it leaves many wandering; why didn't Tetteh Quarshie's entry into the country from Fernando Po with the Amelonado cocoa pods in 1879 come with the similar pump and pageantry that the oil discovery came with? The answer is simple; “In the history of mankind, there are many examples of discoveries made, whose significance to man was not fully appreciated at the time. The cocoa bean was one of such discoveries.”

But why should cocoa be celebrated anyway? To the extent that we could equate it to Ghana. Cocoa as a traditional crop has played a crucial role in generating foreign exchange earnings, government revenues, and household incomes. The role of cocoa in expanding economic activities in rural communities cannot also be over emphasized. Any town or village which joins the league of cocoa producing communities invite into it brisk business, especially through the many cocoa purchasing companies whose spending powers can transform the local economy.

Money from the cocoa sector has gone into the construction and maintenance of road infrastructure through the Cocoa Roads Improvement Project. Money from the crop has been used in building health infrastructure in cocoa growing areas and even in places like Kumasi and Accra. COCOBOD invests an estimated amount of 2 million cedis annually in cocoa scholarship for relatives of cocoa farmers with about 2,500 beneficiaries accessing the scheme annually.

Apart from the benefits that come from government, private sector investment into various spheres of the nation because of cocoa has not been lacking. Private sector companies are investing millions of cedis into the development of rural cocoa communities. The Cadbury Cocoa Partnership for example is an investment programme, worth £30 million over a ten-year period, aimed at transforming the lives and livelihoods of more than half a million cocoa farmers. The COCOBOD/Armajaro Traceable Foundation has invested close to 2 million dollars in water, sanitation, health care, and educational sector developmental projects in cocoa communities. Kuapa Kokoo has over the years invested several millions of Ghana Cedis into the construction of mobile clinics, boreholes, and school buildings, in some cocoa communities.

So what can Ghana do without cocoa? Can you imagine what Ghana could have possibly been if there was no cocoa industry? There would have been a loss of close to two million jobs, loss of massive revenue and foreign exchange, a huge shrinking of Ghana's economy, the stalling of infrastructural development including health facilities, school children dropping out because of the absence of support, and in the long term, a drastic reversal in efforts to reduce poverty and attempts to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

Ghana is indeed cocoa and cocoa is Ghana. Cocoa is the lifeblood of Ghana's economy and the heartbeat of Ghana's socio economic development. Views are sometimes even expressed that the inability of weather conditions in the three Northern regions of the country to support cocoa production is one of the reasons why they are the poorest regions of Ghana, and that if cocoa production was possible there; their economies would have been transformed by now. You cannot dispute an assertion as this even if you don't agree with it because it has no scientific basis.

We may not be major consumers of cocoa and its products as a country; in other words, “we don't eat cocoa,” but we are able to consume what we eat because we produce cocoa. Nothing can be considered more cherished in this world than something which lightens the burden of another. And that is what exactly cocoa is to Ghana. Over the years, the cocoa industry has been the backbone of the Ghanaian economy and shall continue to play this role for a long time to come.

Written by: Joseph Opoku Gakpo Student, Faculty of Agriculture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology