Cocoa beans are the main raw material for the production of chocolate, and Ghana is the world's second largest producer of cocoa beans. But in the country, it is difficult to process cocoa beans to make chocolate, why is that?
Most of Ghana's cocoa beans are exported to Europe and North America before being processed into chocolate. While large chocolate companies make billions of dollars a year, many cocoa farmers live in poverty every day, each earning no more than two dollars a day.
Many growers prefer to have the ability to build chocolate production plants in their own countries, so that the cocoa beans they grow may sell for a higher price.
Local cocoa tree species, due to climate change and diseases, the annual harvest is not ideal. The cocoa trees can be picked every October, and the whole family will go out to pick the ripe pods on the cocoa trees.
They gathered the pods together and then uniformly removed the cocoa beans inside. As for the pod shell, it is left in the plantation as fertilizer. When the cocoa beans are collected, they take a week to dry, and finally sell them to the buyer for less than $800, which is also the family's annual income, averaging two dollars a day.
When the cocoa beans are dried, about 70 per cent of the cocoa beans will be shipped overseas, while less than 30 per cent of the cocoa beans processed in Ghana are processed. The entire processing of chocolate is digitally controlled by the machine, from roasting the cocoa beans to grinding them into a cocoa paste, which is then mixed with milk and sugar to make chocolate.
The whole process may seem simple, but producing chocolate in Ghana is a very difficult thing to do. First of all, Ghana has no dairy products, and if you want to produce chocolate, you must import it, which undoubtedly increases the cost of production, and also needs to import sugar.
Finally, Ghana has a tropical climate, and chocolate is very sensitive to temperature, and any increase in temperature can cause chocolate to melt. So a cold chain system needs to be built to preserve chocolate, and since the cost of building a cold chain is so high, local ghanaian companies simply can't afford these construction costs.
In addition, Ghana's power grid is very unstable, which is also a headache for the production of chocolate, and many unfavorable factors have added up to the inability of Ghana to produce chocolate on a large scale.
Many times, Ghana can only process cocoa beans into semi-finished products. For example, cocoa butter, cocoa pulp, cocoa wine, cocoa powder, not chocolate. What are your thoughts on a country like Ghana, which relies entirely on the export of cocoa beans?