Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

Good for them I guess or is it? I don't understand how you cannot have prosparity from selling raw materials?

If you think you're not being paid enough, increase the price along with creating your own products. It seems weird to me to not let foreign countries buy your raw materials just because you want to produce more stuff yourself.

It's not like I will start buying chocolate made in ghana because they don't want to sell their cocoa anymore. I will still buy from the brands I like and are used to most of the times, which is a local brand.

View on HN

> If you think you're not being paid enough, increase the price along with creating your own products.

Who makes that decision? Cocoa slavery is a thing because the economics of raw material pricing is complicated by many factors but the demand is very simple and very high.

The (effective) demand for beans produced in Ghana just went way down with this policy enactment though, right?

I doubt it. If anything it will restrict market availability which will only increase demand, but the best way to know is watch the price for beans.

I agree that watching the market is the best way to judge the balance.

I'd expect the price for beans as-delivered to Switzerland is likely to go up. The price for beans as-offered in Ghana is likely to go down. The latter matters more to Ghana cocoa farmers.

The farmers who make more money from the slavery aspect rather than the cocoa itself will move on to other crops.

It's 2021, africans can abolish slavery if they want to

>I don't understand how you cannot have prosparity from selling raw materials?

Depending on how big the export is in relation to your economy, it can certainly have a negative effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

I feel like for every measure of progress this might give Ghana, it will give other exporters of cocoa beans 10x as much advantage, at least in the short-term.

>If you think you're not being paid enough, increase the price along with creating your own products.

That seems to be what happened with Mars and Hershey (i.e. a price increase) though put in the terms of not paying farmers enough and trade war. It's unclear to me whether Mars and Hershey are now getting less cocoa than they did because cocoa is being diverted to domestic production, or the same amount and paying more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com