Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Other points are already addressed in different comments, but to address this one:

> Ghana doesn't have all of the layers of industry necessary to support development and export of products i.e. there are no market buyers at any reasonable price.

Per the article, they literally control half of the world's cocoa. This means they get to define what "a reasonable price" is, as long as the rest of the world wants to keep its chocolate plentiful.

I'm not a politician or economist - but to me, it seems obvious the plan here is to bootstrap domestic cocoa processing industries, get the current exporters to sell cocoa to domestic producers, and export processed products (like chocolate). They're not going to just stop cultivating cocoa - being in control of half of the supply of raw materials for a highly prized product is their one big leverage on the international market.

As to not having the necessary industry base to pull it off - the question is, how fast can they build one? I'd guess a couple of years, if no foreign powers try to make it hard for them.

The last time Ghana blocked cocoa sales, the European powers responded by creating plantations in other countries to break Ghanas monopoly of the supply. Then they went a step further in researching and marketing low cocoa chocolate so their domestic population would be less reliant on cocoa.

Agricultural luxury goods are one area where it’s hard to continually push a monopoly advantage.

That said, I think that if Ghana can take the short term repercussions, then the country will come out ahead. It can become to chocolate, what France is to wine. But that would require heavy marketing in order to change people’s perception about what kind of chocolate is most delicious.

> European powers responded by creating plantations

So European companies setup plantations?

But yes, Swiss chocolate manufacturers have some options: a) setup a processing plant in Ghana, b) increase production somewhere else, c) reduce usage..

Maybe more.

Like coffee, this seems to be the better business model. Higher quality rather than quantity. There is a great demand for high quality cacao and high end chocolate makers have been organizing for a while to develop quality cacao production in the producing companies. While it has largely been occurring in Central and South America, I have no doubt that people are looking to reproduce this success in Africa and elsewhere, which is good for both the workers and the chocolate makers. The sooner exploitative makers of low quality chocolate are pushed out of the industry, the better. Europe's reputation as a maker of high quality chocolate may still endure, but it is far less the case now. The state of the art has rapidly been eclipsed by smaller producers in the 21st century.

The first question is: where are the main markets for chocolate? If Ghana loses access to a large percentage of the global chocolate market, controlling half the supply is as much a liability.

The second question is: Is there any reason cocoa can't be grown elsewhere, or the second biggest producer can't increase production?

There is a location/clima reason. Cocoa grows (well) only in a certain part of the world around the equator line as it requires tropical weather with regular rains and small dry seasons.

It may be possible to use artificial techniques to grow it elsewhere, but I'm assuming it's not economically viable or you get a product with worst quality in the end

Yeah, I already see other tropical-zone countries cutting down even more rain forest to make space for cocoa plantations (in addition to the rain forest they are already cutting down or burning for e.g. palm oil plantations). That's not really the desirable outcome here I think...

That's not really any different from what the developed world did when they were in the same state of development.

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