Cocoa production in Ghana
Ghana is the second-largest exporter of cocoa beans in the world, after Côte d'Ivoire, which accounts for about one-third of the global supply.
[6] With some two million children involved in the farming of cocoa in West Africa, primarily Ghana and Ivory Coast, child slavery and trafficking were major concerns in 2018.
Subsidies for production inputs (fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides, and equipment) were removed, and there was a measure of privatisation of the processing sector through at least one joint venture.
Formerly, produce buying clerks had often held back cash payments, abused funds, and paid farmers with false checks.
[14] In addition, bush fires in 1983 destroyed some 60,000 hectares of cocoa farms, so that the 1983–84 crop was barely 28 per cent of the 557,000 tons recorded in 1964–65.
In particular, Cocobod agreed to pay traders a minimum producer price as well as an additional fee to cover the buyers' operating and transportation costs and to provide some profit.
The reasons for this huge production increase are varied and in fact Ghana's cocoa yields per hectare are still low by international standards.
Ghana Cocoa Board's experimentation with privatisation has created a hybrid system whereby despite all exports being controlled by the state, there are now around 25 private companies buying the crop in all areas of the country where it is grown.
[19] Another key determining factor is the distance of the plantation from the main market, as more remote farms more often found it easier to sell to the formerly state-owned PBC.
[19] This hybrid scheme benefits a variety of players:[19] Researchers at the ODI therefore suggest that liberalisation has been good for producers by:[19] Yet the question remains for policy-makers as to the benefits of the state controlling an export monopoly and its strong presence of the public sector in the internal market, whether there should be even more liberalisation, and whether it is providing the right incentives for producers to develop better (and sustainable) farming practices.
On a day when friends and family are available to help, often a Saturday, they work through the pile, cracking the pods open with tools such as machetes and removing the seeds.
[23] A major study of the issue in 2016, published in Fortune in the US, concluded that approximately 2.1 million children in various countries of West Africa "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa".
That puts them well below the World Bank's new $1.90 per day standard for extreme poverty, even if you factor in the 13% rise in the price of cocoa last year.
And in that context the challenge of eradicating child labor feels immense, and the chocolate companies' newfound commitment to expanding the investments in cocoa communities not quite sufficient.
A report later that year by New Food Economy stated that the Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems implemented by the International Cocoa Initiative and its partners has been useful, but "they are currently reaching less than 20 percent of the over two million children impacted".
The purpose of the initiative is to end deforestation and replenish the trees and forests that have been destroyed as a result of the cocoa production in the area.
One of the central tenets of the initiative is a commitment to no further conversion of natural forests to land for cocoa production in West Africa.
In March 2019, the governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana in tandem with the cocoa companies released action plans that laid out concrete steps for ending deforestation.
These steps include forest protection and restoration, sustainable cocoa production with an emphasis on the livelihood of farmers, and a system of social inclusion and community engagement.
