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Using Ghana as a case study, this work integrates economic and political analysis to explore the challenges and opportunities of Africa's growth and transformation.
Published in 1997, this text is set in a context where Ghana has experienced improvements in aggregate output performance over the past decade (1986-1996) yet agriculture's performance remains sub-optimal. The author focuses on agriculture's fragmentation as attributable to space (storage, transportation and marketing), form (rudimentary production methods in general) and content (stagnent productivity and poor organization of production) and notes that whilst current policies have impinged on the space fragmentation, issues on form and content seem to have been left to the dictates of the market. The author calls for a strategy of government plan in promoting modern technology in agriculture to enhance its linkage to industry for rapid and sustainable economic growth.
This report shows that Ghana's economic decline of agricultural prices cannot be attributed solely to government price intervention. But intervention in the workings of the cocoa sector contributed heavly to the country's inability to achieve prosperity and stability after 1957. During the decades since independence in 1957, direct intervention in Ghana's all-important cocoa sector has been in the hands of a Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB), which sets annual producer prices, purchases the crop from domestic producers and markets it to foreign buyers. Although the chief reason for creating the CMB was to assure Ghana's cocoa farmers a stable and decent income, the agency's direct intervention helped to keep producer prices lower than they might have been otherwise. The government's direct and indirect intervention in the cocoa market, according to the study, far outweighed its incentives to cocoa producers. Moreover, most of the benefits of these incentives went to large producers rather than the far more numerous smallholders. Another important finding of this study is that government regulation of the cocoa sector had the serious negative long-term effect of deferring the replacement of old coffee trees with new ones.