Rubber Plantations in Ghana Replacing Food Crops

The last time I visited my father’s farm in Nzema I was twelve or thirteen years old. I don’t remember any mention of rubber plantations. Back then my parents would go to Nzema for the weekend leaving us in Accra and would return with the pickup bed loaded with palmnut, plantain, cassava, yam, snails, and dried meats/fish. I know now that much of that was bought along the way, haha! Since then, he has added fish-farming. When my sisters visited in 2014 they enjoyed their excursion to the fish farm so now it was my turn. When you read N’ku’s trip report you will salivate. Sadly, I only got to revel in coconut. My meal was coconut washed down with coconut with a dessert of coconut. Hahaha! But it was delicious.

 

Along the way to Amokwawsuaso, where the farm actually is, my dad pointed out all the rubber trees that made up the landscape. These all used to be palm and coconut trees in his youth. Again, I was reminded that his grandfather Boso Bebu had a huge coconut farm. Even the neighbouring farm that we had to walk through to get to his was now a rubber plantation. So, naturally, one has to ask. How did we go from coconuts to rubber and what exactly are we doing with rubber?

 

The rubber tree was introduced to Ghana in the late 1800s in the Aburi botanic gardens in the Eastern Region. A small private rubber plantation was established in Dixcove in the Western Region in the 1950s. Soon it became government property, State Farms. In the 1960s the government contracted with Firestone Company of the United States and tyres were manufactured locally at Bonsaso. I’ll repeat, in the 1960s, Ghana produced tyres. Then, as the story goes for many other manufacturing enterprises, the series of coups that beset Ghana in the 1960s to 1980s destabilised the economy. Sometime in the 1980s the government entered into a financial agreement with a French company. Today, Societé International de Plantations d’Hevea (SIPH) is the main owner. Ghana has less than 25% shares. Appalling. We don’t even own our rubber.

 

Local farmers since have been incentivised to grow rubber at the expense of cocoa. Rubber can be a profitable cash crop for local farmers while cocoa farming requires intensive care to protect from diseases. At least that’s the sell of the rubber company. But rubber requires land. Hectares and hectares of land. Land that used to be used for cocoa. Cocoa that had harvest seasons thus allowing farmers to intercrop with subsistence foods such as maize, plantains, and cassava. You can’t plant anything else near a rubber tree. It sucks up all the nutrients from the soil. Furthermore the rubber stinks.

To be fair, the cocoa tree was also a foreign import to Ghana entering a few years after rubber. How it ended up being our leading cash crop is a different story. Still, we could do better to produce end-products here for export, but so far we seem to be stuck at the level of producing semi-finished products (cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, cocoa cake, cocoa powder). But at least that’s something. In the case of rubber it is exported entirely as raw material…and Ghana in the 21st century finds itself importing tyres!

The destruction of cocoa trees to pave way for rubber plantations equals the destruction of food crops. Gradually small villages in Ghana will face food insecurity. If they are not farming food crops for themselves, the little that makes it to the market will be more expensive to buy. Next thing you know, the family is going hungry, and the rubber is sitting there smelling. This is already a reality for many farmers in the Western Region who are still waiting to cash in from converting their farms to rubber plantations. Who eats rubber? No-one I know.