Fair Trade in Ghana

Ghana is a small country in western Africa. It is smaller than the UK. Most of the people in Ghana work in the cocoa bean industry. Many of these people in Ghana had been the victims of scandals and other offenses that left them with no money and left them no choice but to fall into the debt trap. Fair-trade has helped the people of Ghana by giving them a fair price. In this essay, I will be explaining what it was like before, and after Fair-trade.

Before fair-trade, people were working most of the day under the scorching heat with little water just to sell their product, cocoa, to a company in another country that were going to rip them off. When the companies weighed the cocoa, the scales were not accurate and the farmers got less money than the product was worth. For example, When a farmer weighed four bags, it only came up with the price for two. This way the companies could make more profit.

This left the farmer with hardly any money. This left the country with hardly any money. This meant that the country had to borrow money from another, such as America. With this money, they started to build up their economy. But then they ran out of money. This left them in debt, with less money than they had in the first place. They then have to borrow more money to get them out of debt. This continues and the country’s debt rises and rises meaning it cannot develop. This is called a “debt trap”.

After a while, some big charities, including Oxfam put together a scheme to help people in third world countries. They called it fair-trade. The idea of this was to help the producers get a better deal for their products. For example, the farmers would get the price of four bags for four bags. Also, the pay is higher which means that the producer gets a lot more money which means that the economy can move forwards. A big fair-trade company in Ghana is “Kuappa Kookoo”. The people working for Kuappa Kookoo get paid a lot more than another company from a different company.

With the money raised from the new fair-trade scheme, the people of Ghana have enough money to buy a water spring. Normally, the people have to walk up to four miles just to get to a water supply. With the spring, the children have enough energy and time to go to school which means that they can be educated and grow up to get a well-paid job. This will bring more money into the economy and the economy will grow turning Ghana from a LEDC to a MEDC.

In conclusion, I think that fair-trade has helped the people of Ghana by giving them more money and making the quality of life better. Life expectancy will go up because there is clean water around and there will be many more educated doctors because the children can afford to go to school.

I think that the people of Ghana can improve their quality of life even more if the start building better quality houses and have running water in them. I think the more money they get the more developed they can become. Hopefully, as they develop, they start to use renewable energy sources. It would be good for Ghana to be developed but it would be even better if it was also clean.