Tuesday 3 January 2023

A quick note to Ronnie El Chieck - An Australian who is keen on finding green economy investment opportunities in Ghana

Try this for size,Yewura Ronnie:  Some bright spark in New York  City is suing Hershey  (hopes to make it a class action suit one gathers),  the eponymous chocolitier, because the company's Cadbury brand dark chocolate he bought and ingested, apparently contained cadmium and heavy metals.

A little lateral-thinking:  Might it not be the perfect moment to ask Hershey to set up and fund a Ghana branch of America's wealthiest endowed educational institution, the Hershey School, to teach organic climate smart cocoa farming, using  agroforestry principles, to rural youth across Ghana's forest belt - and source own-brand locally manufactured organic cocoa products from Ghana, for the North American market dominated by Hershey?

I am pretty sure that I could persuade  my family to make available 2.5 square miles,  out of our 14-square mile freehold upland evergreen rainforest property in the Akyem Juaso section of the Atewa Range that is part of a designated Globally Significant Biodiversity Area (GSBA), in what used to be the once heavily-wooded arboreal slopes off the Atewa Forest Reserve, for the proposed college's campus, as well as a research centre and demonstration climate-smart organic cocoa farm using agroforestry principles.

As it happens, 99.6 acres of our freehold rainfores land, in Akyem Juaso, actually lies inside the Atewa Forest Reserve that we have legal access to, and is referred to in Forestry Commission jargon, as an "admitted farm" -  which could be leveraged as a community carbon sequestration initiative, to sustainably fund any mooted Hershey School's Ghana branch. Doubt if you could find a more interesting place for such an agroforestry  project anywhere else in the areas of Ghana where fringe-forest cocoa-farming communities exist. Cool.

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