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#27 - Let's discover how cocoa grows in Ghana

For the past three weeks, we have been living in the Ghanaian bush. Having an internet connection for the first time, we are happy to finally share with you our African discoveries.

As you know, on October 25 were held the presidential elections in Ivory Coast. We initially planned to work in this beautiful country, in a large plantation of oil palms, but our contact there feared riots following the announced re-election of ADO and he strongly advised us to avoid finding ourselves in the bush during these turbulent and unpredictable days.

We are now used to adapt to circumstances and we decided not to stubbornly try to find another farm site in Ivory Coast. Quickly, we found a very exciting alternative: go to Ghana to work there with cocoa farmers in the Ashanti region.

After struggling about ten days with the Ghanaian Embassy in Abidjan we finally receive our visas, which allow us to cross the border by bus and to greet our friends of the Ghanaian customs who had leaded us in a jeep on the Ivorian side of the border a week earlier. Equalization of the Travelling Farmers that were led 1-0 by Ghana.

Alternating between a paved but poorly maintained road and red dirt track sections, we arrive after about ten hours of minibus in the city of Kumasi, third of the country and capital of the province where we have an appointment with cocoa planters. Night falls and it is already too late to get further into the bush - so we spend a night in a hotel before leaving the next morning.

A question many people have asked us throughout this year: “how do you find these farms?" or more precisely: "How do we get in contact with cocoa farmers living deep in the bush?". It is a legitimate question and we therefore decide to answer to you promptly.

After a bunch of mails sent from Ivory Coast to all our friends in West Africa, we were directed to a friend of a friend - who becomes, according to the saying, our friend - working for Ecom, a Ghanaian company that buys cocoa from producers and exports to major consumer markets, mostly Europe. This big cocoa trading company therefore has the advantage for us to be in direct contact with farmers across the country.

With the support of Ecom it is decided that we will be hosted by Franck Owsou, a PC -Purchase Collector - who purchases their cocoa to farmers on behalf of the company in a small community of a hundred kilometers from Kumasi. It is late in the morning when we make it to Gyereso, a bush village of 400 souls organized around cocoa farming, and Franck greets us.

Arrival at the village

After ten days in Abidjan while waiting for our visas, we were starting to get used to what we thought was an African atmosphere: a joyous and colorful tropical disorder mixing locals and expats. But just as a tourist having seen Paris is mistaken if he thinks he knows France, we had only a narrow view of what West Africa actually is. Gyereso reached, we get into a different dimension: the houses made of concrete or mud line up along a dirt track serving as the main road, the playground, the meeting point and the market. At the end of the way, spreads a huge football field with bamboo cages, permanent place of gathering.

The sacred football pitch

We quickly get used to being stared at by pairs of wide eyes and shouted at by laughing voices: "Obroni, Obroni! "-" White men, white men! ". And we always smile when a child rushes weeping into his mother's skirts on seeing us – two hideous and scary monsters having clear skin and smooth hair.

Enjoying the hospitality of the Akan tribe that welcomes us, we are each assigned a room in a big square house, organized around a central courtyard bringing family water supplies and food. The first contacts with our neighbors depend mainly on their variable level of English, and gradually we improve our learning of the Twi, the local language. Once we know the few words of presentations and courtesy in Twi, we become the attraction of the village and all our comings and goings in the main avenue leads to endless sessions of salutations

Upon arriving, we were clear about our intention to live as the villagers. Our diet, that we had already adapted to Africa however, changes dramatically. We eat every day fufu, a sort of paste of mashed plantains and cassava accompanied by a fish soup with chilly. The food pleasure curve thus follows a change to which we are now accustomed: the first happy days of the discovery are followed by a few days of doubt faced with the monotony and strangeness of this food, and after a week we get used and do not think about it anymore. Eating relatively small volumes of those dishes we still do not suffer from hunger, which says a lot about the excessive energy intake of these simple and ancestral meal.

The "fufu" is on its way: plantains and casava

Despite the fear of the inhabitants of the village of the river flowing below, Jules can one morning go fishing with John, one of the fishermen community. Sitting in a boat carved from an enormous tree trunk, John paddles and raises its few traps and nets along the river. Fish and crayfish caught end up in the plates of the families of the village on the same evening.

Jules and John on their boat

The big fish of the day

This diet is interspersed with a few pleasures bought on the shelves of the main street like white bread and milk cartons, canned chili and rice boiled eggs, but mostly fresh fruits picked in the forest.

Not so easy to peal an orange with a cutlass

Indeed, the dense jungle surrounding the village is full of natural resources. The fact that our last farming step takes place in this true agricultural paradise takes a special sense to us. Indeed, someone hungry simply needs to cross the edge of the woods and look up to pick up some avocados, bananas, oranges, pineapples, papayas, coconuts ... We had never seen such a lush environment.

Did you know how pineaples grow?

We soon understand the reason for such an abundance: the hot sun shines all day except at night when, with a striking regularity, a violent storm accompanied by torrential rain beats down almost. Water and sun in abundance throughout the year, a magic formula in those areas where the work of man sometimes seems superfluous as nature offers him his blessings.

And in the absence of running water such rainfalls enable to collect the water that the villagers drink, but also to take a shower by standing under the eaves in the courtyards.

A story of the early days made us laugh a lot. We did not understand why a lot of children in the village we approached were simulating kung-fu movements and speaking what we eventually identified as a rough imitation of the Chinese - "ching chang chong". That's Franck, as usual, that gave us the answer to this mystery: no white man ever comes here, but a Chinese mining exploration company regularly dispatches workers there. Having never seen white men, then, but already seen the Chinese, the children took us for prospectors of the East. Continuing its momentum, Franck also told us that some of the adults had also taken us for some Chinese when we arrived. And facing the wild activities of Chinese mining companies, expropriating entire villages after negotiating the purchase of the land with the government and without including the villagers in the discussions, a slight panic had floated on the community at these of us, two visitors with obscure motivations.

Coming to discover cocoa farming, we understand quickly that this resource is the economic heart of the village. Everywhere, spread on braided mats made with palm branches, drying under the sun, we can see hundreds of kilos of cocoa beans. The taste of the beans, very bitter and without any trace of sugar is nowhere close to the milk chocolate we consume in abundance in the Western countries.

Touching cocoa for the first time !

Therefore, everyday we leave to the forest with farmers to help them in their work. After a walk that can last from five to forty-five minutes, we arrive each day on a different plot. The cacao trees are very leafy trees that are between three and five meters high. Plantations do not look like fields but dense forests through which the sun barely filters. Cocoa trees are planted all around the village, but every farmer has a well-defined plot, limited by small rows of flowers we have a hard time identifying with our eyes badly accustomed. On plots where trees are grown, the job is simple. Armed with our cutlass, which we always have with us, we walk through the forest detaching the mature pods. Red or green at the beginning, they turn yellow as they ripen, allowing us to know which to take and which to leave. Another team equipped with large baskets picks the pods on the ground and piles them into a stack of up to five hundred kilos. After the whole plot is harvested, we sit in groups around the large pile of pods, and after a prayer so that the work goes well, we begin to open the pods with a cutlass to extract the beans.

All the pods have to be opened today

A Travelling Farmer doing his job

The white beans on the front, the team working in the back

This work, slow and monotonous is nevertheless very pleasant in the shade of trees, as we discuss with farmers pile up the beans on huge banana leaves. Once the pile finished, we tightly enclose the large pile of white beans with new banana leaves, and leave them there. A week later, the beans have become dark red through a fermentation process, and we will talk them back to the village to be dried on the large mats about which we spoke to you earlier.

Done for today: the beans will ferment under these big banana leaves

On the way back, we pick up the oranges, bananas and papayas that we want and bring them back to the village quietly.

The nature is great in Ghana

No question, however, to bring these products with our arms: it is on the head that these heavy victuals are all transported! Of course we tried to carry ourselves these charges, since local people seemed to do it without difficulty. Yet, surrounded by the laughs of everyone around, we had to give up after only a few meters, lest our neck might break. We had to satisfy ourselves with carrying the banana bunches and small bags normally reserved for ten-year-old children…

What we could not carry ...

... And what we could carry

Back from work

Combo !

When a farmer sees that his beans are dry, he calls a PC - a buyer of Ecom – who comes to him, weighs and buys his production which is packed in big bags containing 64 kilos of cocoa . Trucked to a regional warehouse in Accra and then to a port, these beans will be exported without transformation to Europe where customers of Ecom will process them.

Franck and Juls check the cocoa before buying it

The cocoa then goes to the Bibiani warehouse

The big cocoa buyers are not many; Franck teaches us that every region of Ghana supplies a particular buyer, country or big company. This division helps meet the specific needs of each client in terms of quality of the beans. The Bibiani area where we work provides for example cocoa to Denmark. In the rest of the country, some cocoa production areas exclusively supply Lindt, Ferrero or Nestlé.

By discovering cocoa culture, we are surprised by the collective organization of work. Indeed, although each farmer has his own plot, as soon as one needs to harvest or open the pods, he can rely on all of the other farmers he knows. So every time we work, it is with the owner of the plot and its five, six or seven friends coming to help. This system seems quite logical, but what strikes us is that it is based on mutual aid and in the complete absence of contracts or accounting. Thus, I can help my neighbor five days a month on his farm without being paid or without asking him to help me an equivalent number of hours. This is the first time in our trip we find such a way to organize work. Wherever we worked this year people helped each other, but here the scale of the phenomenon is impressive.

A team of workers looking at the work they did

An other team, back from the fields

By talking with Franck, who shares with us his understanding of the industry, we learn that despite everything that grows in Ghana (and it seems that everything grows in Ghana), cocoa farming is the only one that is well organized, with a dense network and reliable buyers. Banana, plantain, yam, oranges or papayas grow everywhere, but supply exceeding demand these crops are only doomed to direct supply of local populations. The ever-growing appeal of the West and China for chocolate in all its forms has meanwhile made cocoa prices rise, a source of wealth extremely well redistributed to the people at the bottom of the ladder. Unlike the mining industry for example, which does not enrich the local people, the cocoa cultivation that can barely be mechanized or intensified dramatically improves the lives of thousands of bush surrounding villages. They are the indispensable links at the bottom of the chain that allow French schoolchildren to spread Nutella on their slice of bread before going to school.

Anotther thing we dicovered here it the plam wine. In the middle of the jungles, farmers collect and prepare the wine from fallen palm trees.

A distillery in the bush

Other typical African anecdote that was given to us to see: the village is often crossed by huge trucks carrying huge logs to sawmills in the region. One day we notice that one of these trucks stopped on the side of the road and that a barricade prevents it from leaving. After explanation, we learn that the logging company operating on the village land pays its cuts with delays and that the ancients of the village have therefore decided to block the truck until someone pays. Fair enough.

During our few weekends at Gyereso, we have the chance to attend several local ceremonies. First, on Sundays, we go to the Anglican Church in which Franck usually goes. Amazed, we discover the traditional form of the Mass: it lasts more than three hours, the priest's sermon can take nearly three quarter of an hour, and most of all, every spiritual song results in an incredible turmoil with almost everyone coming dancing in circle in front of the altar, waving white tissues.

The Travelling Farmers at their best

These moments of intense joy in which everyone dances and laughs as much possible amaze us a lot. We attend indeed those collective outbursts several times, often in broad daylight, and note that the abandonment of each one to the present moment, to the common euphoria is absolute: no need of alcohol to destroy inhibitions, no need to take "selfies" to prove to everyone how their existence is great, just a common desire to be happy about what life offers them of beautiful.

One Saturday, we also have the opportunity to attend a wedding. Dressed in traditional cloth, we followed the long ceremony, again interrupted regularly by dancing and fabulous songs.

The Church completely packed

The state of mind in which we lived this last step, however, was different from the rest of the adventure. While we had hitherto strived not to project ourselves into the future to live with our eyes fixed on our incredible daily life, the approach of our comeback has made this discipline difficult to follow. Of course we shared the life of the community everyday, but alternating inside us the understandable desire to see our family and the desire to enjoy the way these final days of adventure Travelling Farmers.

Nevertheless, this total isolation (we have not seen a single white man this month) and the lack of internet has allowed us to immerse ourselves one last time in the foundations of our project this year: to get away from what we know to live a more concrete and simple life.

This is even with the feeling of having reached the climax of our adventures that we see our project ending. We are happy about all the way we went through over the past 10 months, and we are moved by the idea of ​​finding back our loved ones.

And we owe you many thanks for the interest you gave us from the beginning of our journey. We sincerely hope that our communication (less common when we had no internet access) will have allowed you to travel with us, if only few minutes a week, and share our wonderments.

Perhaps we will see you soon in France, or, if we met you during this journey, fate will make us see you again one day during news travels.

Finally, we would like once again to thank our main sponsors: CLAAS tractors that helped us throughout the preparation and during the adventure itself, Ineva Partners who dared to bet on us, and Exclusive Motion which gave us a significant help. Without you we would not have left: thank you!

Other articles on the consequences of this adventure will surely follow, but for now, and after ten months of exciting adventures, we say to you: good

Travelling Farmers

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