I spend a fair amount of my time in Ghana listening to the BBC while doing various things around the house. As a side note, between the BBC and Nature Network, the British have captured a disproportionate share of my limited media access. Anyway, I was washing some clothes (by hand in a bucket, a lot of Peace Corps life revolves around buckets) and listening to “World Update” when I heard that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding some agricultural projects aimed at improving cocoa and cashew production. The press release/article can be found here.

As I touched on a bit in the last post, cocoa is immensely important to Ghana, and West Africa as a whole. So are cashew nuts, and in fact one of the defining elements of the landscape in my part of Ghana are the cashew trees, planted in large stands as farms, and in small copses around houses for shade and small income. The cashew trees are coming into season right now, and the regional buyers are setting up scales in the center of town to weigh the bags of nuts that the farmers bring in, and pay them the going rate per kilogram. It’s a very direct transaction, so improvements in the amount that farmers can produce, or the price they are paid, are very direct improvements in their standard of living.

In this area the farmers primarily grow yams and cassava, but there isn’t much of an export structure (even to other parts of Ghana), so the dominant cash crops are the cocoa and cashew. The farmers often own cocoa farms that are located to the south, in the wetter Western region, and cashew farms that are locally based here in the Brong-Ahofa region. These enterprises are the main ways in which they get money, the money that sustains their families, sends their children to school, and is spent within Ghana developing the domestic economy. With an ambitious goal of doubling farmers’ income from these crops by 2013, if the projects funded by the Gates Foundation were successfully implemented in this area they would make a tremendous, and tremendously direct, difference in the livelihoods of these farmers.

From the article, it sounds as if the constellation of groups receiving the funding are going to be focusing on all aspects of cocoa and cashew production, from soil fertility on up to marketing. And that’s great, because the translational piece of putting improved crop varieties and methods into the hands of farmers needs to go hand in hand with concern for those farmers when determining who benefits from the value chain. I mean, using the phrase “farmers” sounds so clinical; these people are my friends who take me out to their land to show me how to harvest the yams and collect the cashew nuts. As our global society tries to thread the needle of sustainable development in the coming years, we’re going to need more projects like these to help out smallholder farmers who do the heavy lifting in providing the world it’s agricultural goods.