The Cocoa Conundrum: Why Ghana’s farmers are poor despite making the world’s best chocolate

The State of Things Every so often, you come across an economic situation so perverse, so utterly divorced from basic market logic, that you have to wonder how it has survived for so long. The case of Ghana’s cocoa sector is a textbook example. Here we have a country that produces some of the world’s finest cocoa—the essential ingredient for a multi-billion dollar global chocolate industry.  Yet the smallholder farmers who are the bedrock of this industry remain trapped in extreme poverty, ma...

By Ebenezer Afanyi Dadzie