ParkLane

will be a fine brown colour. They can then be bagged and transported to the Ghana Cocoa Board buying centre. But prices are not that good and things are so expensive. At present two bags of cocoa can’t even buy a half-piece of cloth (six metres, the required length for a woman’s costume).’

Nten worries about the future. ‘In spite of all the hard work I’ve put into growing cocoa to have a legacy for my children, so far none of them has shown any interest in it,’ he says, with a rueful look which reveals the years in his face.

It can safely be said that Nten has a lot of children. He catalogues them on his fingers: ‘My senior wife has nine; the junior has six; a former wife had six, but we lost one; another, divorced, had four and also lost

Ghanaian gold: locally made chocolate.

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olden Tree Golden Tree Asset Management
Golden Tree Chocolate-

Cocoa Processing Company

Whittaker's Chocolate

not to mention the side issues…’ he recites with laughter.

Putting so many children through school, along with the constant investment in new crops, has left Nten with very little spare cash. ‘If I were younger, starting life afresh, I would be an advocate of family planning,’ he chuckles.

But like most farmers, his personal needs are few. When they go to the market at Abenkro, highest on the list are salt, soap, radio batteries, matches and smoked fish.

Sometimes Nten’s wives bring vegetables to sell and use the money to buy what they need. He’s only too happy to encourage them to keep the money they make so that he won’t have to spend too much on them.

Nten hasn’t given much thought to what white people do with the cocoa they buy from Ghana. ‘I just grow it for the Government to buy,’ he says. He believes that it is the ‘Engresi’ (British) who are the main buyers, and the ‘Fransi’ (French) too. ‘I’ve heard that cocoa is an important food for them. They say that the whites dote on sugary things and they use cocoa in these foods and they make “chocrate” with it.’

He’s never tasted chocolate and doesn’t think it is available in Dormaa-Abenkro (it is). ‘What do I need chocrate for? My stomach knows only plantain and cocoyam.’

Ajoa Yeboah-Afari freelances from Accra. She was formerly Deputy Editor of the Mirror, a national weekly newspaper in Ghana.

CORN/MAIZE

A song of the strong

SUGAR

Bitter, bitter sweet

RICE

The control of girls
SOYA BEANS

In summer, dog meat is too yang

BANANAS

Yellow perils

COCOA
A legacy for my (23) children

Worth reading on... food
An entertaining and interesting look at the origins of some foods, which gave rise to the idea of the ‘meal‘ behind this magazine, is Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner (Penguin 1989). Women's role in a range of foreign-policy transactions – often unseen, seldom considered – is the subject of Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Pandora 1989) by Cynthia Enloe. John Warnock's The Politics of Hunger (Methuen 1987) gives an excellent historical view of world food production as well as analysis of the current situation. For a detailed look at the effects of the Green Revolution, read New Seeds and Poor People (Unwin Hyman 1989) by Michael Lipton with Richard Longhurst. Henk Hobbelink's Biotechnology and the Future of World Agriculture (Zed 1991) sets the biotech debate in the context of sustainable agriculture. And the classics Food First (Abacus 1980) and World Hunger: Twelve Myths (Food First/Grove Press 1986), both by Joe Collins and Frances Moore Lappé, are still hard to beat for a clear account of the powers at play in the world food arena.