Persistent indebtedness in the global cocoa chain: a socio-material perspective

Credit–debt relations between producers and so-called exploitative traders are considered a key cause of producer indebtedness. This fuels interventions to eliminate exploitative traders in commodity chains, yet alternative arrangements often fail. Therefore, indebtedness persists. This paper critically examines the conditions and practices that produce and reproduce relations of lending and borrowing and consequently indebtedness, which are closely linked to the question of what complicates changing this indebtedness. We investigated the current conjuncture of intermediation practices in Ghana’s cocoa sector, which for over a century has fostered producer–intermediary credit–debt relations and associated indebtedness. Our study analyses relations between intermediaries and producers as a credit–debt dyad constituted by social and material conditions, which foster interdependencies and generate indebtedness as an inevitable outcome. This leads to an account that centralises material conditions in the social relations of debt and exposes both cooperation and tensions in producer–intermediary relations. We show how the strategic vulnerability of producers and intermediaries in navigating the materiality of production and aggregation fosters the evolution of the credit–debt dyad as a routinised and consistent socio-material relation where the value of reciprocity inherent in it complicates changing it without a fundamental change in material realities.