The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana

Opening Paragraph The development of commercial cocoa growing in Ghana is always assumed to be something of a miracle. It evokes the stereotype of the plodding subsistence farmer, eking out a living by a system of shifting cultivation in the forest. This peasant is correctly presumed to have been unfamiliar with the cash economy centred on palm produce for export and deriving mainly from areas south-east of the forest zone, but he is somehow supposed to have desired and contrived to fit a new permanent orchard crop into his ‘traditional system of food farming’, thus creating cocoa farms of from 1 to 3 acres from which were exported 80 lb. of cocoa in 1891, 536 tons in 1900, and 40,000 tons in 1911—since when Ghana has always been the world's largest cocoa producer.