Part 2: Cash Crops (Cocoa) Over Food Crops - Ghana’s Misplaced Priorities with its 200,000 hectares state-run cocoa farms
In the first essay of this series, I explored how Ghana’s plan for 200,000 hectares of state-run cocoa farms creates a conflict of interest, with the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) poised to become both referee and player in the cocoa sector. We saw how this “judge and jury” approach could sideline smallholder farmers and erode trust. Now, in this second part, I turn to another troubling aspect of the plan: its priorities. As a cocoa farmer’s son, I have always understood farming to be about feeding people and sustaining communities. Yet here we have the government pouring vast resources into cocoa, a crop we export for chocolate abroad, instead of investing in the food we actually put on our tables each day. In this essay, I will argue that using national farms to grow a cash crop like cocoa, which Ghanaians do not eat, is a misalignment of national priorities. State-funded farms, if they exist at all, should bolster food security and provide a safety net against hunger and high food prices. By focusing on cocoa, the government not only risks neglecting the country’s food needs but also undercuts the rural employment that smallholder cocoa farming has provided for generations. Simply put, the plan raises the question: Should Ghana be growing more cocoa for export when it still struggles to feed itself?
National Farms and Food Security
Government intervention in farming is not new in Ghana. In the 1960s, our first President, Kwame Nkrumah, established large state farms with the dream of rapidly modernising agriculture and achieving food security. Influenced by visits to the Soviet Union and China, Nkrumah believed state-run farms could introduce new technologies and boost the production of key staples. The State Farms Corporation he launched didn’t just dabble in one crop; by the mid-1960s it ran over 100 farms growing everything from rice and sugar to cocoa and cotton. The emphasis, however, was clear: these farms were meant to ensure Ghanaians had enough to eat and to drive economic development, not merely to export more cash crops. Nkrumah’s initiative ultimately collapsed due to poor management and high costs, but it’s telling that even in that bold (if flawed) experiment, food security was front and centre. The logic was straightforward: a national farm should serve a national need. In a country where people were at risk of going hungry, the state farms were aimed at producing staple foods and providing affordable nutrition to citizens.
Fast-forward to today, and Ghana’s challenges have evolved but not disappeared. We are no longer a nation that can feed itself comfortably year-round. In fact, Ghana spends an astonishing amount of money importing food. Last year, Ghana’s food import bill soared past $3.5 billion (reaching as high as $4 billion by some estimates) on items like rice, poultry, cooking oil, sugar and even tomatoes. We import frozen chicken from Europe and Brazil; we import rice from Asia. These are foods we could and should be largely producing domestically, yet our markets are flooded with foreign staples because local production hasn’t kept up with demand. This dependence on imported food is not just a hit to national pride, it makes us vulnerable. When global supply chains wobble or foreign prices spike, Ghanaians feel it in the form of high food prices and occasional shortages. For example, disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war sent the prices of bread, cooking oil and cereals through the roof in Accra and Kumasi. Policymakers and experts have been warning that Ghana needs to focus on food security and reduce this over-reliance on imports for our everyday meals.
Against this backdrop, the government’s decision to invest in 200,000 hectares of cocoa, a luxury export crop, appears badly misdirected. If we have hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and significant funds to invest in agriculture, should those not be directed towards boosting the supply of maize, rice, yams, plantains, and other staples that feed Ghanaians? The concept of “national farms” (state-owned or supported agricultural projects) usually implies creating a buffer for essential goods, grain reserves for when harvests fail, for instance. Indeed, Ghana even has a National Food Buffer Stock Company, which buys and stores grains like maize to stabilise supply and prices for consumers and institutions. The whole idea of a buffer stock is to have reserves of food in case of shortage. But you cannot stockpile cocoa beans to feed a hungry population, cocoa is not eaten as a staple food. It’s processed into chocolate and cocoa powder and luxury items, mostly overseas. In essence, expanding cocoa production does nothing to fill a hungry stomach in Ghana. We can’t boil cocoa beans for stew or serve cocoa with fish and banku. So if the nation is going to pour resources into farming, shouldn’t it prioritise foods that can directly benefit Ghanaians’ diets? The mismatch in priorities is glaring.
Cocoa vs. Food? Export Wealth at the Expense of Local Hunger?
Defenders of the government’s cocoa farm plan might argue that cocoa is the backbone of Ghana’s economy and a major source of foreign exchange. It’s true, cocoa has long been called Ghana’s “golden pod.” It brings in about $2 billion in foreign currency earnings each year, helping to pay for some of those very food imports I mentioned. But there is an uncomfortable irony here. Even as cocoa revenues are used to import rice and poultry, we could ask whether doubling down on cocoa is a sustainable or sensible way to achieve food security. For one, cocoa earnings, significant as they are, still don’t match what we spend importing food. Our $2 billion from cocoa is outmatched by the $3-4 billion we spend importing food. In other words, even if these new state cocoa plantations succeed in boosting production and export revenue, much of that money could literally be eaten up, spent on buying foreign rice, frozen chicken and cooking oil. Would it not be smarter to invest directly in reducing the food import bill by growing more food locally? By improving irrigation for rice in the north, by subsidising maize or vegetable production, or by helping farmers raise more chickens locally? Every cedi invested in cocoa is a cedi not invested in food crops that could improve our self-sufficiency.
