Ghana's Political Class Must Aim To Make Our Nation The World's Leading Organic Cocoa Producer

A few days ago, I had a phone call from a young man, who had read  a number of articles I had written about the importance of Ghana switching from growing cocoa with synthetic chemical inputs, to growing cocoa organically instead, and, as a people, aim to become the world's leading producer of organic cocoa beans and processed organic cocoa products.

Naturally, I was glad that someone from the younger generation, was also keen on organic cocoa farming - for it is that paradigm shift in the cocoa industry that will help to secure its long-term  future.

Luckily, a pilot project was  undertaken years ago by  the NGO, AgroEco, and the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), which collaborated to  help a number of farmers to set up the Cocoa Organic Farming Association (COFA), with the view to assisting them to go through the three-year conversion stage to certification.

So there actually is institutional memory in CRIG to provide the science to underpin this new paradigm.

Incidentally, one humbly urges all the members of Ghana's political class to give serious consideration to promoting organic farming in all the sub-sectors of the national economy's agricultural sector.

Eating organic agricultural produce, such as fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes, will undoubtedly help to improve the health of Ghanaians in dramatic fashion.

As regards the cocoa industry, such is its importance to the health of our national economy, that Ghanaian politicians need to be a tad more creative, in their thinking on the subject of organic cocoa farming in our country.

Perhaps the question they must ponder over is: Why outdo each other making campaign promises to cocoa farmers that ever-greater quantities of carcinogenic pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, will be sprayed free of charge, unto their cocoa trees, in government-sponsored mass spraying programmes - when the number of consumers in the main overseas export markets for Ghana's cocoa beans, who prefer organic cocoa products, is growing exponentially? Loopy.

Ghana's politicians also need to understand clearly that the activities of both the lawfully registered so-called small-scale mining sector and illegal galamsey gold miners, impact cocoa farming negatively.

Using 32-tonne excavators, in so-called smale-scale gold mining  and illegal galamsey gold mining, actually amounts to mining gold on an industrial scale - and it is having a devastating effect on the cocoa industry.

One humbly urges the leaders of all the political parties in Ghana, to go to the fringe-forest village  of Akyem Juaso to see for themselves, how gold mining has impoverished cocoa farmers there, whose cocoa farmlands were bought by Solar Mining Limited - which to all intents and purposes, in a strictly legal sense, was at that stage of its existence, a small-scale gold mining entity engaged in illegal gold mining in the area without an EPA permit, but which subsequently reversed into Kibi Goldfields:  in order to cloak itself with the respectable garb of regulatory legitimacy and protect its wealthy and powerful promoters that way.

The truth of the matter is that gold mining and cocoa farming cannot exist side by side. Akyem Abuakwa's cocoa farming sector is a classic example of this brutal fact of life - at a time when global climate change is impacting Ghana so negatively.

The leaders of all the political parties in Ghana ought to take a close look at Akyem Juaso and learn from the experiences of the cocoa farmers there, who no longer have their cocoa farmlands to farm cocoa  on.

Perhaps undertaking such a trip  might help those politicians, who seek the support of the selfsame super-ruthless, greedy and selfish people destroying what is left of Ghana's natural heritage - by engaging in illegal galamsey gold mining and its handmaiden illegal logging - to rethink their plan to legitimise galamsey operations in Ghana, and fashion out instead, a much better and more sustainable policy, which will help to secure the future of Ghana's cocoa industry, and revive the local economies of forestbelt cocoa farming areas such as Akyem Abuakwa.

That is a more responsible way for them to proceed - if they actually care about the nation's cocoa industry's future, that is. Creative thinking on the part of our nation's leaders will solve most of our nation's problems. Indeed there is no problem that creative thinking cannot solve. Literally.

For the information of our nation's hard-of-hearing political class, the future of Ghana's cocoa industry will be secured only by making Ghana the world's leading organic cocoa producer.

Mass-spraying tonnes of carcinogenic pesticides onto cocoa trees in a world that increasingly wants to eat organic food - and which therefore will eventually cease buying cocoa beans and cocoa products that contain pesticide residues - is definitely not a smart policy in the long-term. For that reason, members of Ghana's political class ought to aim to make Ghana, the world's leading producer of organic cocoa.