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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"With Ghana’s move towards processing its own cocoa, the world, and not just Switzerland, will experience a massive shortage since Ghana is responsible for about 45% of the world’s cocoa."

That seems like bigger news than the headline.

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It's also a massive assumption... first of all that Ghana won't be able to process & export chocolate in significant quantities, and second of all that other nations that are paying the LID won't be able to pick up the Swiss slack.

Surely the cocoa won't just be burned, someone will find a way to process it.

If Ghana is able to process its own cocoa at the same rate as the Swiss, or at least accelerate to such productions soon, then the world won't see a massive shortage of chocolate, just of raw cocoa.

It seems reasonable to me. My understanding is that the ones adding the value, by turning the raw material into chocolate, are the ones making the majority of the profits.

That 45% figure in the article is wrong; Ghana produces about 18% of the world's production. They hold a lot of the world market because they have low prices. If they raise their price, their market share will drop, and other countries could move in and take their position. There's simple market economics at play.

It may encourage the major chocolate processors to build processing plants in Ghana.

This must be done with caution. Crashing the internal chocolate price will hurt Ghanaian farmers in the short term even as the country attempts to negotiate the country to a better place.

"Governing a country is like frying a small fish" -- Tao te Ching 60

My local shop got its chocolate from Honduras and Nicaragua. They visited the farms and arranged to have the beans processed there. Meant they could import a liquid and not an agricultural product. So it didn't have to be fumigated. A big win.

They could also ask Switzerland to pay 30% of their revenue, similar to what Apple does.

They can outbid the local companies if they want to. The whole point is that Ghana wants to move up the rung from a producer of raw goods to more value add to their exports

they'll move production elsewhere, problem solved

why people do not think nowadays?

I'm no expert, but there are articles from many different sources saying that the transition will result in a crisis, and will take a long time to resolve.

i doubt it, they anticipated that many years ago, they only import 1/3 from ghana, easy to replace

source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

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