Fair Trade: Look Deeper

A Letter from Josh Heikkila, serving as Regional Liaison for West Africa, based in Ghana

April 2020

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. -Revelation 22:1-2

At a worship service I recently attended, we read from the end of the book of Revelation. It described the beautiful vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth and God coming to dwell among the people and the world he created. Listening to it read, I was struck again by the image of the tree of life on the banks of the river, producing new fruit for each of the twelve months of the year.

The image of strong and healthy trees bearing good fruit appears again and again in scripture. Psalm 1 comes to mind, where the faithful are compared to trees planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season, with leaves that do not wither. When the Bible speaks of fruit-producing trees, I can’t help but think of life in Ghana, the place where I currently live.

In the backyard of my house in Accra, there are plantain, papaya, and mango trees, each giving fruit at their particular times of the year. I’m excited as the dry season ends – the beginning of spring in the United States – when our avocados ripen and become ready to eat!

If you’ve ever read Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “The Poisonwood Bible,” you may recall her wonderful description of Americans in Africa encountering fruit trees for the very first time. The book is the story of a conservative missionary family in the 1960’s Congo, told through the lens of the family’s children. If you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it!

“The fruits,” one daughter Leah explains, “mango, guava, avocado – these we had barely glimpsed before, in the big Kroger store in Atlanta, yet now trees reach right down and deliver such exotic prizes straight into our hands!”

“Mangoes, guavas, pineapples, and avocados,” according to another daughter Adah, “came and went in mysterious seasons (not unlike the Lord’s ways) but at least did grow in our yard, free of charge. Bananas were so abundant around the village people stole them off each other’s trees in broad daylight.”

If you’ve never seen a cocoa tree before, it can be an unusual sight at first. The fruit, rather than hanging from the branches of the tree, grows as a pod off the trunk. The seed of this fruit (sometimes called a bean) is fermented, dried, and then ground into powder, which becomes the primary ingredient of chocolate.

The fruit of the cocoa tree is not eaten for sustenance. Instead, it’s a hugely important cash crop in countries like Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria. On family farms across the forest belt of West Africa, families grow cocoa (in addition to crops for personal consumption), which is then sold for extra income. It’s not unusual for children to help on these family farms after school and on weekends.

Major industries in Ghana include drilling for oil, mining for gold, and growing cocoa. Each brings in roughly the same amount of money to the country. (One local company, in fact, refers to cocoa as “brown gold.”) While we might not hear much about the economics of cocoa, it has a profound impact on the region. The market price of cocoa sometimes affects whether the government can provide education, healthcare, and necessary infrastructure for the well-being of the people.

Most of the cocoa exported from Ghana is in the form of the unground beans or powder. While prices always fluctuate, cocoa powder is currently selling for about a dollar a pound. The United States and Europe charge little or no tariff to import beans or powder. But, as soon as the cocoa is processed a little more, these same countries impose a tariff of 25 to 30% on the cocoa that Ghanaian cocoa distributors import into Europe and the U.S.

In the competitive market for chocolate products, companies try to avoid paying this tariff. They import unprocessed cocoa, which is then made into chocolate domestically. Even companies that boast of being fair trade do the very same thing. The tariff system has largely prevented West African countries from processing the cocoa they grow, thus keeping them trapped at the level of farming the cocoa. The value that is added to cocoa, therefore, ends up in the pockets of Western processors, and farmers in West Africa remain at levels near poverty.

One aspect of PC(USA)’s Matthew 25 initiative is eradicating systemic poverty. The initiative highlights the need to “change laws, policies, plans, and structures in our society that perpetuate economic exploitation of people who are poor.” Looking at the economics of cocoa, you can see this is one area that needs to be addressed.

When we Americans meet our West African partners, we often hear stories about their everyday lives. They tell us about the way God has endowed them with the gifts and skills they are using to thrive in this world. When we hear these stories, our own lives are enriched, and our faith strengthened. The Matthew 25 initiative reminds us that we also have to go deeper, because our own economic prosperity can sometimes be intricately tied up with perpetuating the poverty of others.

I wish I had solutions to all the problems we face, and answers to all the questions. Obviously, I don’t. But I trust that as we work together with our West African mission partners – listening and learning about each other’s lives, it will help us to work for the improved well-being of all God’s children.

-Josh