Ghana is the world’s second largest producer of cocoa – the main ingredient for chocolate production.  In fact, 30 percent of the world’s cocoa output comes from Ghana; Tetteh Quashie’s Ghana.

Despite the huge wealth the cocoa industry generates across the world, cocoa producers live under some of the most impoverished conditions you will find in rural Ghanaian communities.

Ghana receives more than 1.5 billion dollars in revenue from cocoa export each year. This represents about one-third of the country’s total export revenues. And on the global market, cocoa production, trading and processing is estimated to be worth more than one hundred billion US dollars annually. But most of this money does not reach the ordinary cocoa farmer.

Joseph Abu, a cocoa farmer at Ahumakuromuah speaks to me about the challenges facing local farmers.

Most of the cocoa growing communities are characterized by poor, uncoated, bumpy roads, lacking basic amenities such as; electricity, clean water and mobile telephone network, poor educational infrastructure for children and lack of or ill-equipped healthcare facilities. Homes are built of mud, showing deep cracks. Many of them on the verge of collapsing.

That is the story Joseph Opoku Gakpo tells in our latest edition of hotline "Poor Millionaires" aired on Thursday 4^th December 2014 on Joy 99.7 Fm.  

A house at Anto in the Western Region

A broken down bridge at Sekyere Obuasi. 

 

Listen to the audio below: