This is a continuation of my previous post.
Prior to independence, when Cote d’Ivoire was under French rule, cocoa production was stifled because the French authorities were more interested in growing rice and cotton. So the forests of the sparsely populated Southern and Western parts of country, which had huge potential for cocoa production just lay fallow. Perhaps it is useful for me to point out that cocoa is not native to Africa. It was introduced from Latin America in the course of the 19th century by European colonialists [1]. After independence in 1960, the government of Houphouet-Boigny, whose reign lasted 33 years, the longest of any African leader [2], encouraged a free for all migration to the southwest part of the country in a bid to encourage cocoa and coffee production. Migrants from the northern part of the country as well as from Burkina Faso and Mali, flooded the southwest. There was harmony so long as cocoa prices remained high and there was ample farmland, but when cocoa prices crashed in the 1980s and the economy went into a tailspin, ethnic tensions began to simmer as the issue of land ownership was brought to the fore. From the highs of the mid to late 70s, the monetary income cocoa farmers reduced by 60%-80% in the 80s and early 90s. The following graph attests to the fact:
Looking at the graph, you do not need to be a genius to realize that cocoa prices are volatile. This is true about just about any other commodity (e.g. oil). Commodity prices are generally volatile because they are lot more sensitive to the fluctuations in supply and demand than manufactured goods. This makes economies based on commodity production (i.e. almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa) inherently unstable.
The ethnic tensions inflamed by the crash of cocoa prices no doubt played a part in the two recent civil wars experienced by Cote d’Ivoire, the first between 2002 and 2007 and then again in 2011 [3].
In a previous article on the demographic transition, I pointed out that much of Sub-Saharan Africa is at stage 2. Countries at this stage are experiencing a population explosion as a result of a combination of high birth rates and low death rates. Now that the farmlands for cocoa in Cote d’Ivoire have been exhausted, to increase yields they are going to have to resort to scientific and technological methods. In other words, they are going to have to industrialize cocoa farming. Once they do that they are not going to need the vast majority of people who currently earn a living from cocoa farming. This is means that they are going to have to tackle the difficult task of creating labour intensive manufacturing industries to absorb the farmers that have become surplus to requirements. They will need to do this to prevent the social conditions from becoming any more explosive than they have been in the recent past.
In closing, I would like to point out that there are lessons for the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa from the Ivorian cocoa experience. I had pointed out earlier and in a previous article that diminishing returns sets in much faster in agriculture than it does in manufacturing or services. It is all agricultural practices that I am referring to, not just cocoa farming. This applies to other commodity driven activities like mining and oil exploration. So what has happened to cocoa farming in Cote d’Ivoire, if it has not already happened, will sometime in the future happen to other farming practices that use similar small scale techniques, and since we are talking Sub-Saharan Africa, that essentially virtually all farming practices. I am hoping this incident will make clear that industrialization is an inevitable step in economic development needed to secure a decent livelihood for the masses.
BEFORE YOU GO: Please share this with as many people as possible and check out my book Why Africa is not rich like America and Europe. Thank you
References:
- Tooze, Adam Feb 19 2023 ‘The closing of the Cocoa Frontier’ Chartbook #196 https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-196-the-closing-of-the
- Wikipedia article on Houphouet-Boigny
- Tooze, Adam Feb 19 2023 Chartbook ‘The closing of the Cocoa Frontier’ #196 https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-196-the-closing-of-the
