Page 41 - Afrika Must Unite

26 AFRICA MUST UNITE
cocoa was m anipulated by European and American buyers, who
included, besides the large chocolate manufacturers, the big im­
porters and distributors of food products, farm implements and
manufactured goods. Joined together in their association, they
forced down the price of cocoa, while the cost of imported com­
modities, upon which our people became more and more
dependent, as a result of single-crop farming, remained stable.
During the war, the British Government set up group market­
ing boards in the West African colonies as agencies for the bloc
purchase of raw materials by the M inistry of Supply in London
as part of its planned arrangements for satisfying the metro­
politan rationing system. O ur present Cocoa M arketing Board,
which operates our bulk purchasing and selling of the crop,
developed out of these wartime arrangements. This system of
planned purchase and sale enables us to give the farmers a
guaranteed price fixed to prevent a domestic inflationary spiral.
There has been a steady elimination of the predatory middlemen
who used to act as the agents of the big merchant firms and
chocolate manufacturers, while the foremost of the trading firms
has itself retired from this sphere of activity. But the twin purpose
for which our economy had been geared under imperialist rule,
of providing markets for British products and mercantile
services, and the export of cocoa, and mining commodities, on
the basis of low-paid labour, cannot overnight be replaced by
one more suited to the needs of modern Ghana. The pattern of
its monopolistic control was firmly set in the first quarter of the
present century, w7hen the pioneering firms and our own African
‘m erchant princes’, as they were called, were either forced out of
business or absorbed by the giant companies. A substantial
volume of petty trade came to be carried on by thousands of
women street hucksters and market vendors. These women, a
few of whom have accumulated some sizeable capital, play an
im portant part in our internal trade distribution. But they are
reliant for their supplies on the monopoly firms, for whom they
provide the cheapest kind of retail distributive system it has been
possible to devise.
Under colonial rule, foreign monopoly interests had our whole
economy completely tied up to suit themselves, jIn a country
whose output of cocoa is the largest in the world, there was not a