KUMASI, Ghana – It’s the morning rush at a lorry station in Kumasi.
In the centre of this bustling city of more than a million people, travellers scramble to buy tickets, porters load heavy packages onto the top of minivans and hawkers swarm around the open windows of departing buses, attempting to sell everything from fresh bread to toothpaste.
Among the vendors is a teenaged girl, balancing a round metal tray of brightly packaged chocolate bars on her head.
She calls out the brand name of the locally produced bars: “Kingsbite. Kiinngggsbite.”
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The only taker is a western backpacker. At around 70 cents Cdn for a small bar, chocolate is an extravagant luxury that costs more than most ordinary Ghanaians can afford.
This may seem surprising, since cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate, is to Ghana what wheat is to the Canadian Prairies.
However, of the more than 700,000 tonnes of cocoa produced last year, only one-fifth was used domestically.
The first cocoa seedlings were brought to this former British colony in 1879, and by the turn of the century, cocoa was the largest source of foreign income.
Today, cocoa is a main ingredient in Ghana’s economy. According to the Ghana Cocoa Board, it accounts for about 30 percent of the country’s total export earnings.
When you eat chocolate, there’s a good chance it originated in Ghana. Only neighbouring Cote D’Ivoire sells more cocoa abroad.
A half day’s drive west of Kumasi, close to Ghana’s border with Cote D’Ivoire, farmer Teteh Solomon uses a machete to clear weeds from between the trees on his cocoa plantation.
This part of Ghana is accessible only by four-by-four or bush taxi and is known as “the part of the map with no roads.” To get to Solomon’s farm, visitors must bump along a dirt path for more than an hour, passing by the occasional village of mud and stick huts.
There is no phone reception or internet connection, yet Solomon is profoundly affected by the outside world.
He’s been growing cocoa for 10 years.
When he planted his trees, commodity prices were strong. But in the late 1990s, the price of cocoa on the world market fell dramatically.
By 1999, the price had fallen to around $350 per tonne.
However, a civil war in Cote D’Ivoire in 2002 rescued Ghanaian farmers.
While it had a devastating effect on what was once one of the most developed countries in West Africa, the political uncertainty in the heart of cocoa-producing country was good news for Solomon and his colleagues just across the border.
Cocoa prices doubled in one year and kept rising. Now, farmers receive $1,300 a tonne for their cocoa.
“Before, the cocoa price was not good,” Solomon said through a translator.
“But when they started increasing the price, every farmer got ideas of a brighter future. I now want to build a very nice house in my home town. Because when you have the money, you have to use the money to do something good.”
Despite the price increase, Solomon is desperately poor by Canadian standards as he struggles to pay school and medical fees for his five children.
When it comes to improving his situation, better prices are just the beginning.
Only efficient production and high yields will dig him and his fellow farmers out of poverty, but there are no machines and few fertilizers and chemicals to help. Solomon and his family do all the planting, weeding and harvesting by hand.
Another local farmer, James Agei, said labour is also a problem.
“I am only one man. The work that I want to do in a week takes longer than that,” Agei said as he paused from his work under the shade of a plantain tree.
“By the time I get all my work done, the rainfall has stopped. If you have the advantage of the rainfall, you have to use it. I’m not getting things done as soon as I should because I can’t afford to hire the help I need.”
These are tough problems to solve, but a Canadian scientist is trying to help.
Marney Issac, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, has worked with farmers in Ghana for two years, helping make their cocoa plants as productive and long-living as possible without chemicals and fertilizers.
A big part of her job is studying how cocoa interacts with other plants found on the plantations.
“If a farmer in Canada walked into one of these farms, they might think they are in a forest,” she said. “It’s very structurally diverse, which is probably the most striking feature.”
That means cocoa grows alongside other food crops, such as yam and plantain, and Isaac is studying different plant combinations. Her goal is to find one that produces high-yielding, long-living cocoa trees.
She takes soil and plant samples from different areas and analyzes them for iron, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium content.
She’s held several community meetings in these tiny, remote villages and is now looking at broadcasting her findings on the local community radio station.
“The meetings always start off small and then grow,” she said.
“The last one, I expected to be there an hour, and it was three to four hours long … and by the end there were 50 to 75 people there, and everyone was talking about their farms and what they are doing and everyone was participating and it was really quite amazing.”
Agei has been involved in Isaac’s work from the beginning and appreciates the information she’s bringing to the community.
“It’s information I want to depend on,” he said.
Despite the hardships, Agei and Solomon say the new information and higher prices have made them optimistic about cocoa farming.
If conditions continue to improve, they may someday be able to afford to finish off their simple meals with a dark, luxurious bite of Ghanaian-produced chocolate.
