3071-The political economy of new slavery

160 Child Labour, Education and Child Rights Among Cocoa Producers in Ghana
main institution allowed to sell cocoa for export. The cocoa industry
was partially liberalized in 1993 and this enabled the creation of private
Ghanaian cocoa-buying companies, which buy from the farmers and
sell the cocoa to the government. Technically, these private companies
are allowed to sell up to 30 per cent of their cocoa purchases for export,
although most companies do not use this facility (for reasons of credit
access), and the government remains the main cocoa exporter.
Thus the cocoa chain can be summarized in the following manner:
the farmer sells his or her cocoa to a local cocoa-buying company, which
sells it to the government cocoa board, which sells it on the world
market to chocolate manufacturers such as Cadbury or Nestlé. It is a
myth that unscrupulous foreign buyers buy directly from the farmers;
the ‘man from Del Monte’ of advertising campaigns, does not have
a Ghanaian counterpart calling on cocoa farmers and offering them
lamentable returns for their hard work. Even Fair Trade organizations,
some of which claim to be buying directly from farmers, have to go
through the channels described above. Direct purchasing from cocoa
farmers for export is standard practice in countries such as Cameroon
and Nigeria, but it is not common in the case of Ghana, where Cocobod
mediates most of the cocoa purchases. The only difference between the
Fair Trade chocolate manufacturers and others is that they only buy
cocoa that has been sold to the government by Kuapa Kokoo, a cocoabuying
company that satisfies Fair Trade criteria. This arrangement is
strictly monitored to ensure that only cocoa produced by farmers who
are members of the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative can be sold as Fair Trade.
Another myth is that the cocoa farmers in Ghana are poor and
therefore reliant on their children’s labour because of unpredictable
world market fluctuations and low commodity prices. Historically, the
price of cocoa in the global market has not been the same as the local
price given to producers in Ghana. Following independence, in order to
address the volatility of prices in the post-war period and to stabilize
prices paid to farmers, the government instituted a fixed-price policy
based on the former colonial model. This means that the price of cocoa
to be given to farmers by cocoa-buying companies is set annually by
the government, independently of price fluctuations on the world
market. For example, following a military uprising in the Ivory Coast
in September 2002 and general political instability in the region, the
price of cocoa on the world market reached a 16-year high. This did
not affect the price paid to farmers, for whom the price of cocoa for
that year had already been agreed. However, independently of this, the
price was reviewed shortly after, and the government raised the price