Price fixing kills the cocoa farm
There has been a wicked price spike in cocoa beans which the usual suspects are blaming on “climate change” as if your air conditioner was ruining cocoa crops in West Africa. Instead African governments have fixed the price of cocoa for decades, forcing poor farmers to work for a pittance, and keeping the big profits for themselves. Not surprisingly, even though there is a wild price spike, farmers in Ghana are leaving the industry, smuggling crops out (because they get a better price). They didn’t plant new trees, they ran out of money for fertilizer, and didn’t try new varieties. Their children don’t want to farm cocoa, and the yields are falling on old sickly plantations.
So, surprise, socialist government controls wrecked the industry and they are now scrambling to put the pieces back together. Things are so desperate, the government of Ghana raised the price of cocoa by 58% last April and then raised the price of cocoa by another 45% last September, to try to reduce the smuggling. (The government was losing too much money). At one point last year it was estimated that a third of the national crop was lost to smugglers. A few months after this, the farmers were hoarding their beans in expectation the government would have to give them another price rise. Just chaos for everyone.
Meanwhile other socialists use these failures to tell us they have to fix the weather and we must give them lots of money to do it.
It’s always the way. Big Government creates a crisis and then beats us over the head with it, to demand more money and power. Greenies pretend to care about the poor, but they are happy to exploit the poor farmers of Ghana as fodder for press releases for their industrial “renewable” schemes, and banker friends.
Feel the pain of these farmers. Some of them have farmed for decades, yet they have nothing to show for it, saying “ It feels like we are working for other people’s benefit.”
Ghana produces the world’s cocoa; why are its farmers still poor?
Ghana has farmed cocoa for over 100 years. The country is the world’s second-largest producer, behind Côte d’Ivoire. The cocoa industry employs over a million people and contributes about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. In recent times, prices of the commodity have increased exponentially, pushed by extreme climate events and supply chain crisis on fertilizers used by farmers.
Yet farmers like Anane and Holiata say they see little of this wealth. They point to the low prices set by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), established in 1947. The board sets cocoa prices to regulate the industry and protect farmers from exploitation by European merchants, but farmers argue that these prices fail to reflect the crop’s true value on international markets.
The Cocobod traders were forward selling as much as 70% of the crop one year in advance. But when weather, disease, and a lack of fertilizer hit the crop, the bureaucrats couldn’t find the cocoa they’d already sold. They were caught short, forced to buy cocoa on the open market which sent the prices rocketing. (If only climate models worked, eh, they could have seen this coming?)
According to Oxfam, up to 90% of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income. Many of the 800,000 smallholder farmers who cultivate the crop survive on less than $2 a day, struggling to afford basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.
The cocoa industry is rife with human rights issues, like forced child labor, and slavery. When the environmentalists start to care about pain and suffering in the here and now, instead of theoretical storms in a hundred years time, we might think they give a damn about making the world a better place.
Photo by Charles William Adofo on Unsplash
Apparently man-made climate change made it too wet, then too dry. Sure, we believe you…
The weather has been bad in Ghana in the last two years, first it was too wet which rotted the old sickly trees, and then it was too dry, but no climate model on Earth predicted both these extreme seasons correctly (the witchdoctors might as well use chicken entrails), and other countries nearby suffered bad weather too, yet they increased their crop yield. Nigeria’s cocoa exports saw a year-over-year increase of 15% in October 2024, and Cameroon’s cocoa crop is expected to rise 7% this year.
Price fixing, and regulation hurts the people it was supposed to protect
The Government of Ghana formed the price fixing board to try to protect farmers from volatile prices. Instead they trapped them in poverty and fed a bunch of bureaucrats that may destroy the local industry.
Under Ghanaian law, selling cocoa to anyone other than the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) through its licensed buying companies (LBCs) is a crime. The market is tightly regulated, with prices set annually by the government through the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC).
If the government had offered a service but not forced it upon the farmers, the Cocobod bureaucrats would have had to stay competitive, or the farmers would have abandoned it to make their own deals. But there were no brakes or accountability on the government. In the end, the farmers did abandon it, but years too late, because it was against the law to smuggle the cocoa out of the country — so the farmers had to be desperate before they would take the risk.
It takes up to five years to grow new cocoa plants, so chocolate will be expensive until the free market solves itself, which it will, as long as the government gets out of the way.
Compulsory Marketing boards in 3rd world countries are almost exclusively about rent seeking by the politically well connected. They sit back and soak up the massive margin between a buying and selling price. Occasionally someone gets too excited on the futures market and blows that years profits.
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Hi everyone, the missing images should update in the next few hours, still having website troubles unfortunately.
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Now is the time for Australia to increase our coffee crop size, the damn things grow wild in my yard, with our ability to mechanize, it should keep a lid on prices.
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Climate change is not responsible for the flooding.
‘We are urban planning and sustainability scholars. In a recent paper we analyzed whether flooding in Accra, Ghana’s capital, was caused by climate change or poor land use planning.
‘We conclude from our analysis that flooding is caused by poor and uncoordinated land use planning rather than climate change.’ (Phys.org)
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As Alan Jones, a preeminent Australian broadcaster, often said “we have no problems that were not created by government”.
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Have a look at the Hawkesbury flood plain adjacent to Sydney NSW. Housing developments everywhere.
Climate Change or greedy State and Local Guv’ments?
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When cocoa production returns to the average yield and prices stabilize at a lower level will that also be the fault of climate change? I expect not.
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The Australian Wheat Board worked marvellously well. Until the scholars wrecked it.
the AWB was by law the sole trader in the Australian market. This gave it about the same market clout as a number of multinational traders, putting it on a level footing.
The AWB borrowed cash at harvest time on a government guarantee to pay COD for sufficient wheat to plant the next crop on time.
As the new crop was sold the cash was used to repay the loans. When the loans were repaid the surplus was directed to the growers according to their equity in the crop.
Only once did that guarantee cost the government.
Usually the set price for local (Australian) consumption was lower than the export price. The growers accepted this subsidisation of local consumers because they got the benefit of a secure and stable market.
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The world cocoa bean production since 1961 to 2023 shows a steady increase from 1.19 million Ts to 5.6 million Ts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cocoa-bean-production?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
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Don’t laugh but something very similar is happening in The UK. Not with cocoa but farmers are being forced off their land by Government edict. For some strange reason a Labour (closet Marxist) Government wants to disenfranchise farmers and build solar and windmill farms. Then increase the price of electricity to pay for it. Australia too has its own version of this black magic with Blackouts Bowen and serial liar Albo Tross. If Labor wins the Federal Election it will only be with the aid of the green Slime that can only exist in a vacuum.
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Isn’t this disinformation? Significant Climate Change does not exist, at least not in the last 37 years since Presidential Candidate Al Gore invented it in 1988 and the UN jumped on board with its IPCC.
But we had the same in the Australian today where Jordan Petersen is labelled as a pusher of toxic masculinity when in fact he has saved thousands of young lives and given meaning to millions.
When something is wrong, you have a short list. Climate Change is currently top. Putin. Toxic Masculinity. Transgenderism. Black Lives Matter and in Australia, giving aboriginals a ‘voice’. What’s missing are President Xi, radical transgender activists, Jew hating Greens, Intifada and a large group of privileged inner city types who believe everyone else is at fault. And electric cars will solve all the problems, as long as they are not Teslas and electricity is free. Because wind and sun are free. Frankly for the modern public servants on massive salaries, everything is free.
Now to blame everyone else for the cost of chocolate. Like that evil Cadbury family.
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Why is 2005 the current base for Net Zero? Why not 2025? In which case we have nothing to do. How would returning CO2 to the levels of 2005 fix anything? Where? Crops world wide are booming with more CO2. And as poor Sri Lankans found, banning fertilizers means not enough food and no income. But then the Greens don’t care if everyone else dies. You cannot have Progress otherwise.
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H.G.Wells wrote about this situation in 1895 with his Time Machine, the super privileged Eloi and the destestable Morlocks. And the Green Eloi today care more about chocolate than the thousands of people a day dying in Ukraine.
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Gotta love some of these mission statements from companies, NGO’s and government departments these days. The Ghana Cocoa Board- “……for the development of the industry through the introduction of pragmatic and sustainable productivity initiatives“. Love for them to define “pragmatic”. A couple of years ago Sri Lanka tried to implement sustainable agriculture practices too. It ended with food shortages, public riots and the quick exit of the Prime Minister and his government.
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Selling your product on the open market for what it is worth in that market is a crime, where obeying the law leads to penury?? And we have had an alleged fair trade movement for decades? And statists use this state interference/theft as evidence for the need for more state interference/theft? Wow. And the statists blame free markets for the ills of the world!
Has the world always been so topsy turvy? Actually, yes, one way or another! Perhaps, at last, communications will help resolve some of these anomolies. Be aware of who wants to clamp down on freely available information.
We are at war, a slow, grinding war. It is inevitable we will win, because truth is truth and lies are lies, but it will not be easy and it will take time. Every misstep they make adds a little more to a broad change in consciousness. Bernays et al can only do so much. They think they can do more, but they falsely take credit for behaviour changes caused by other factors. Their hubris is their weakness.
A reality shaped by truth will be vastly different from the curated reality we now inhabit.
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For example: https://stylman.substack.com/p/mkultra-the-hidden-hand-part-1-the
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Has government market manipulation and price-fixing, whether of food, fuel, consumer goods or energy ever been anything but a failure long-term?
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The Quaker family Cadbury once bought a newspaper. And the rich and famous family became pariahs with rival newspapers calling him a slaver and exploiter of chocolate workers in Ghana. So despite all the great good done by the family, they were suddenly under attack by the Press.
This is documented in the amazing book The Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury. And they also bought the other quaker businesses including Pascal. It’s a great read because their good works have had such an amazing impact on social solutions, especially the factory village of Bournville where they provided transport, swimming pool, tennis courts, decent houses, social support and quality working and living conditions. As did Lord Lever (Lever and Kitchen, soap kings) in Liverpool, Merseyside with his Sunlight workers village development. These social reforming concepts became the models for future suburbs across the world.
But it is amazing now a hundred years later that the Climate Change press are now saying the conditions in Ghana are a consequence of the use of fossil fuels! Which is absurd. But it means no one really gave a hoot about conditions in Ghana in 1900 or today. It’s all fake news.
And in passing, the American Quaker Forrest Mars stole the secret for making milk chocolate from Swiss pioneer Lindt by taking a public tour of the Swiss factory. He was convinced chocolate would make him rich where his father was famous for his fudge. But Forrest and his wife were childless and adopted an orphanage of 700 boys and ultimately left their massive fortune to the boys. Amazing people. In the 19th century 10% of the English were pacifist tea totalling chocolate eating Quakers, but you hear nothing of them today.
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I want to know about the Polar Bears drowning from Climate Change in the 1990s. People used to dress up as poor polar bears. Have the people died out too?
Though the most amazing Climate Change animatron at St. kilda in Melbourne was a giant bloody motorized disembowelled robotic Koala whose chest would open and close to horrify people. Global Warming killing the koalas. Really? And recently in Victoria 700 koalas were shot by State Government snipers in helicopters and almost no one said a thing. So it wasn’t Climate Change which killed the koalas after all, but caring Government snipers.
Climate Change previously known as Global Warming is the gift which just keeps giving for our moral superiors. Except they really don’t care about the people in Ghana or the koalas.
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At the moment I am in discourse with several parties who seek power and control through arrangements that hinder us, not improve our lives. The parties include a bank, an insurance company, a hire car company, he financial complaints authority, a hospital and a couple of medicos.
I invite you to download your own copies of, for example, bank or insurance agreements, to study if they are their to help you or the other party. You might be horribly surprised by what you discover.
The tactics being used on you have similar form to the poor cocoa growers case so clearly described by Jo. Geoff S
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Remember the panic regarding coffee beans ? With the rise in the price of Cocoa beans production will rise (market rules…). Everything that is in short supply will be blamed on climate change , but carbon increase will only assist volumes . Artificial scarcity will always be temporary .
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