Synthetic products threaten real cocoa sector

For lack of political will, illegal small-scale mining thrives in Ghana’s hinterlands. Looking on unconcerned, compounding our woes in the cocoa industry. With foreigners joining the mining invasion, Ghana’s trade and agricultural secrets are probably leaking, and competitors are likely to exploit them to their advantage.

The use of harmful chemicals like cyanide, cadmium, and mercury by the amoral forces calling themselves miners also leaks into the environment. The water table in the ground, surface water, and crop farms, cocoa inclusive, risk contamination, with immense implications for health and trade. The CSIR Soil Research Institute in Kumasi has facts pointing to the occurrence of these hazards.

One of the daughters of former President Jerry John Rawlings, Yaa Asantewaa Agyeman-Rawlings, raises another threat engulfing the cocoa industry. It is the external threat to cocoa – the increasing tendency of chocolate companies to resort to biotechnology to meet world cocoa demand.

“Personally, not sure I am buying the rationale offered as their reasons for investing in GMO lab – grown cocoa beans. This is, as usual, the invasion of biotechnology companies into a sector that should be relying more on organic methods to meet food demands,” she said. Seventy percent of the world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa, with the Ivory Coast and Ghana being the bulk suppliers. The cocoa supply chain has come under severe strain. With global cocoa demand rising by three percent every year, the bulk supply side too is facing real troubles.

West Africa has recently been hammered by droughts, rising temperatures, plant diseases, and pests, causing between thirty and forty percent losses in crop production. The future of Ghana is bleak; miners have penetrated the industry, buying cocoa farms as the price bait is too juicy to ignore. Then the cocoa farms are converted to mining. Ghana’s leader has warned that such unholy exchanges will be prosecuted. Time will assess his strong rhetoric. Biotechnologists are modifying the cocoa gene structure by clipping out certain genes to make it more resistant to disease and pests. In addition to gene editing technology, scientists attached to some chocolate companies are directing focus to lab-grown cocoa and cocoa butter. The Synthetic substitutes diminish the genuine cocoa business.

For this to draw out the reserved Yaa Asantewaa Agyeman-Rawlings, it must be a matter of curiosity – the fallouts of the dynamics of the cocoa industry ..