FLASHBACK: 'The future is very poor': Ghana's cocoa farmers decry low prices

Ghana is widely known as a cocoa-producing country and also one of the largest exporters of cocoa.

However, cocoa farmers said they do not see a good future with the production of the beans as they struggle to produce the cash crop.

Read the full story originally published on December 26, 2020, by africanews

The job is labor-intensive and the prices of chemicals needed to maintain the farms have been going up in recent years.

Cocoa farmers in Ghana are increasingly growing disillusioned with the crop.

They say returns are low and that they are struggling to break free from poverty.

"Cocoa's future is very poor. It's very poor. It's very poor. We don't like it. We want the government to just increase everything for us because we spend time, our energy mostly on the side of the cocoa business, but after all, we get nothing", said Bensil Aryetey, a farmer.

Millions of small farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together grow 60 percent of the world's cocoa, live in grinding poverty.