Marketing West Africa's Export Crops: Modern Boards and Colonial Trading Companies

The establishment of marketing boards in British West Africa in the 1940s was heralded at the time as a drastic, perhaps revolutionary change in the produce trade. The political implications were undoubtedly great: public enterprise (the marketing boards) had replaced private enterprise (a number of trading companies), and the ongoing debate on their relative merits made a colourful excursion to West Africa in the 1950s because this region offered a clear-cut case for comparison. 1 The differences between the organisations were thus inevitably highlighted.