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The writer is a contributing columnist
Nearly 50 years ago, I began my journalistic career covering cocoa farming in Ghana for the FT. A fortnight ago, I returned to Ghana’s Ashanti province to see how the farms, the industry and the lives of cocoa growers had changed since 1980. The experience was sobering.
Ghana is the world’s second-largest cocoa producer, and recent years have been boom times for cocoa: world prices more than tripled in 2024 to hit record highs of over $12,000 per tonne at the end of that year, before falling back to around $3,000 a tonne by the end of last month. Yet most Ghanaian cocoa farmers remain poor and the problems that plagued the sector in 1980 — poor roads, ageing trees and farmers, rampant smuggling and a shortage of inputs — remain the same today.
Ghana’s Imani Centre for Policy & Education estimates that more than a third of the country’s cocoa farmers only earn about 5.90 cedis (about 55 cents) a day, less than a third of a living income for a farm family of five. It concludes that “high prices do not necessarily translate to improved livelihoods”, mostly due to the size of farms — about half of Ghana’s cocoa farmers cultivate less than two acres — and low productivity.
Nana Ntim, 72, farms cocoa in the tiny village of Anyinatiase, where cocoa trees climb a steep hill behind his mud-brick and corrugated-iron dwelling. “If the roads weren’t so bad, we could sell our crop for much more in Kumasi [the provincial capital],” he told me through an interpreter as he perched on a low stool fanning a charcoal flame. Instead, local farmers must pay a big cut to intermediaries whose trucks can navigate the bone-jarring dirt track to the trunk road. I know that track: my taxi averaged only 10kph on it.
“When politicians are running for office, they always promise to build ‘cocoa roads’, but the roads never get built,” Ntim says. “And now the government has cut the cocoa price.” In February, the farm gate price for cocoa was cut by nearly 29 per cent per bag in response to falling market prices.
Ntim says he had planned to replace some of his ageing 20-year-old trees, but the price cut will make that impossible. And he’s worried about climate change: “When it’s so hot like this” (my iPhone had shut down at this point because of the heat) “the trees produce less,” he tells me.
Emmanuel Opoku Acheampong, national organiser for the Ghana Co-operative Cocoa Farmers and Marketing Association, believes the price cut will make things worse. “We have never heard of this in our history,” he says, adding that farmers protested against the cut. He says it will increase smuggling to neighbouring Ivory Coast and encourage illegal gold mining on cocoa land, known as “galamsey”.
Dinah Frimpong, one of Ntim’s neighbours, tells me she only recently became a cocoa farmer in middle age after inheriting a small plot of land — entering the industry when global prices were high. But she doesn’t expect her family to remain in cocoa for long: “My children are in school, and they don’t want to come back here and farm.”
My local translator, a 24-year-old who grew up in the village, says young people like her are not willing to grow cocoa. “Farming is too hard work,” she says. The average age of Ghanaian cocoa farmers is 64, Acheampong says.
The country is struggling to break out of the same old vicious cycle. Poor roads increase transport costs, which reduces farm profitability, discourages investment in inputs and new trees, and dissuades young people from growing cocoa. “The problems of the 1980s still persist today,” says Frank Bannor, a development expert at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration. “And that’s an indictment of us all as a country and as a people.”
Much has changed: Ghana’s cocoa production has more than tripled since 1980. But soon Ecuador could overtake Ghana as the world’s second-largest producer, according to Anthony Myers, editor of industry newsletter Cocoa Radar. Will farmers of Ntim’s generation — and mine — see Ghana break out of its cocoa poverty trap? If half a century wasn’t enough, I’m not sure what will be.
