Ghanaian cocoa smallholders in the global chocolate production network & the effects of international standards

Abstract

Cocoa is a popular globally traded commodity, with Ghana supplying 20% of the world’s cocoa through its 800,000 smallholder farmers. However, cocoa farming is characterized by intense social, environmental, and economic precarities, and the global cocoa-chocolate production network has not changed significantly since colonial times. A majority of processing, sales, and consumption is taking place in the Global North and the cocoa growing countries in the Global South function as raw material suppliers. The consequences are unequal power relations, division of labor and value-added linkages that leave only a small portion of the margin in the growing countries.

But how can these imbalances be overcome in an age of global agri-food networks? A widespread and established attempt to counter these issues is seen in the implementation of certifications for sustainability standards, but their impact has been uneven. The proliferation of certification schemes is rooted in the restructuring of consumer markets and competitive dynamics in the retail sector which is why it is not able to bring fundamental change of the global cocoa-chocolate production network’s architecture. Cocoa processing companies are responding to this changing consumer demand of information with their own sustainability labels, which specifically communicate geographical knowledge about production locations and conditions. By doing so the perspective of cocoa farmers is hardly taken into account.

Well-communicated information about sustainable cocoa production and origin can encourage consumers to buy sustainable products and invest in sustainable production. Chocolate companies use this knowledge transfer to promote their products and investment opportunities, but this has still no effect on the fundamental architecture of the existing inequalities within the global cocoa-chocolate production network. A German company’s chocolate production and knowledge hub in Ghana uses geographical knowledge to create the impression that buying their products or investing in their chocolate production has a significant impact on sustainable production issues, and aims to increase local value creation and rearrange the existing architecture of the global cocoa-chocolate production network.

Additionally, we show that the Ghanaian government plays a key role as it limits the entrepreneurial freedom of the Ghanaian smallholder cocoa farmers by exercising its institutional power. To analyze to which extent the attempt of relocated production affects the architecture of the existing global cocoa-chocolate production network we use our empirical data collected in 2021/22 in Ghana and Europe, applying a mixed methods approach. These data include: a quantitative survey of 210 Ghanaian smallholder cocoa farmers - embedded in different cultivation, standard and cooperative settings and 52 qualitative interviews with various actors within the global cocoa-chocolate production.