No Time for Cocoa:

...A system of shareholding can easily be worked out, whereby each member of the North Atlantic community is allotted a fair share of the costs of the program and also, over the very long run, shares in the amortization of these costs...

...For some time to come, Ghana must sell what it has to sell in order to remain even viable...

...New techniques preserve the harvested cocoa in warehouses for five to six years, instead of the former two or three...

...Underdeveloped nations are finding long-term low-interest loans harder and harder to procure...

...Yet every additional day of slavery to the nation's primary product carries Ghana closer to ruin...

...It is a poverty that is the result of long-standing patterns of commerce, production and consumption—the accumulations and deposits of centuries, now all in a state of upheaval and disorder...

...Ritner, » native of South Africa, is currently in Columbia University's African Area Studies Program...

...For each day that passes puts additional strain on the present inequitable structure and deepens the abyss that divides the West from the lands in which a good part of the future of mankind will be played out...

...The markets for the uranium and copper of the copper belts of Katanga and Northern Rhodesia are steadily contracting...

...But things haven't worked out this way...

...And they do not have the weight to transform or "mutate" their own economic structures...

...Second, how can the American (and North Atlantic) populaces be awakened to the importance of built-in deformations in the world's commodity market places—a seemingly farfetched and abstract issue...

...Thus, for the present, any commodity scheme concerted by the advanced nations, any institution set up along the lines we have outlined, must be an apparatus resembling the domestic crop-support program that now constitutes one of the largest burdens of the American budget...

...Poverty turns men into frightened mobs and their leaders into international desperadoes...

...The right approach to revitalizing the structure of price and commodity desuetude in the underdeveloped world can be seen clearly in the specific case of Ghana...

...But it is unlikely that all the peoples of the underdeveloped world are going to sink supinely into Tobacco Road because Western economic managers cannot find a way to cushion equitably at least some of the shocks of the market place...

...During the same period these regions would become politically independent, their status shielded by international covenant, so that the West's new economic wooing would not deteriorate into another round of "economic imperialism...

...In the South, where marginal cottongrowers were pushed to the wall over generations, we ended up with an exhausted land and a bitter, exhausted people...

...In 1960, the small West African nation was responsible for about half the world's total cocoa production, or about 450,000 tons, an all-time high for the country, up 100.000 tons from the previous year...

...They are prone, therefore, both to victimization and to the bitterness that follows upon victimization...

...A sugar glut is ravaging the islands of the Caribbean, Production-line artificial diamonds are imminent...

...But the short-term challenge of getting started on any such self-regulating and self-balancing development is something else again...

...The real dilemma is twofold: First, the economy of almost every country in the underdeveloped world—including most of the fabled oilproducing desert-lands—runs along lines parallel to those of Ghana...

...Current inventories are from three to four times larger than they were a year ago—more than large enough to depress the market permanently...

...Here Susan and Peter Ritner analyze the implications of this problem for the West and, using Ghana's dependence on cocoa as » case in point, offer a proposal designed to help it achieve economic viability...

...And almost 20 per cent of its population is directly involved in cocoa cultivation...

...In the long run, nothing less than the whole future of the West is at stake in this business of what euphemistically is called the "international economy...

...Profits are needed today in order to purchase freedom from commodity slavery tomorrow...

...a Ghana that is self-sustaining in agriculture, able to cope with its own social revolutions (e.g., population growth), able to enter into profitable commercial relationships with the outside world, and able to protect its own interests...

...Hence, the international economy must be revised to make it possible for Ghana to earn its way into the modern world...

...To sum up then: The underdeveloped countries are already living marginal existences...

...In other words, the poverty of the underdeveloped world is not an unalterable fact but the result of economic Organization—something that can be managed and changed, given the determination to do it...

...And given the "affluence" of America and Europe, and the political unreliability of non-Western nations, the financial managers of the West more and more prefer to invest their money at home, a process reinforced, as Gunnar Myrdal has brilliantly demonstrated, by the "welfare state" enactments which affluent societies increasingly tend to pass...

...To begin with, the conventional resources of the underdeveloped countries have been drowned under drastically increased social demands, including rising populations and appetites...

...Yet Ghana cannot sell cocoa and live and thrive amidst the fantastic social revolution that is shaking it to its roots...

...Zinc has been largely replaced by a plastic...

...Countries with money, like the United States and Britain, are already buying about as much cocoa as they want, while Ghana and its cocoagrowing competitors—such as the Ivory Coast—are producing more than ever before...

...Ghana started off life as a sovereign state with about $500 million in its till, the savings of years of careful British husbandry of the cocoa revenues...

...World output of cocoa is rising 200 per cent faster than consumption...

...His new book, The Society of Space, will appear this fall...

...Brazilian warehouses already contain more than one-and-a-half years' supply of coffee...

...And the stubbornly sinking price of coffee affects not only Brazil but a score of smaller nations, from Costa Rica to Angola, whose whole economies—such as they are—are based on coffee...

...It is already too late to think in terms of a more modest stabilization instrument, or of any program offering less than substantial, immediate profits in all the crisis commodities for all the nations concerned...

...For Ghana, the price of cocoa might be held at something like $28 for the first 10 years of the plan, which would bring a fair profit...

...What is worse, the situation is likely to deteriorate rapidly...

...They have next to no economic alternatives, no choices...

...We look forward, for example, to a Ghana that possesses progressive social policies, a stabilized currency and developing industries...

...In many of them, per capita incomes are dropping rapidly...

...At the same time, all of these primary-product countries are importing more and more food...

...Therefore, these powers, with their commodity bank, must design their program with a view not only to financing the day-to-day survival of the underdeveloped countries but also to encouraging the transition to self-sustaining "balanced" economies...

...Consequently, Ghana will this year suffer a loss of at least 37 per cent in cocoa revenues as compared to 1957...

...No one presumes that Western legislatures are going to fancy a vast, static stockpiling scheme that has no foreseeable end...

...The problem, of course, is not limited merely to Ghana and cocoa...

...But the Accra government was never able to concentrate this treasure in any meaningful scheme of "social breakthrough" or economic diversification...

...and $21 for the next 10...

...The financial difficulties of underdeveloped nations which rely on a primary-product economy are becoming more acute as supply continues to overreach demand...

...WHAT, THEN, can be done...

...The plan's purpose would be to give the Government and people of Ghana a breathing spell within which they could, with legitimately earned profits from cocoa, finance and manage their own transition to a state of modest, balanced industrialism and diversified agriculturalism...

...It will undoubtedly run into enormous opposition in Congress and financial circles, and, more important, it will not meet the need...

...They must earn their keep by producing their increasingly unsalable "commodities," if they are to earn it at all...

...To keep Ghana going in the next few years, therefore, the world must buy its cocoa...

...This projection was and is the basic assumption underlying the preachments and policies of nearly every South American, Asian or African nationalist politician...

...But the markets for all these commodities are failing, because in the advanced purchaser countries the technological revolution, a revolution picking up momentum rather than tempering itself, has gone one step farther and begun to release manufacturers from their dependence on natural raw materials...

...As of January 1961, the world price for cocoa was at least $4.20 per hundredweight lower than the break-even price for the Ghanaian government's marketing board...

...financial magazine to end their commitments in various West African countries, now that it is no longer necessary to operate smelters in proximity to deposits of bauxite...

...What is most difficult to foresee here are the chances of this problem being dramatized so that the democratic peoples of the North Atlantic community comprehend and feel the reality of the present unjust and selfdestructive structure of international commerce...

...This means, for the immediate future, that Ghana is going to have to sell all the cocoa it can produce, at a price which will bring its farmers a reasonable income and its Government a reasonable revenue...

...Drawings are by Margo Cooper...

...Because of the increasing domestic demand, economists thought, well-heeled prospectors from the industries of the advanced world would range over the whole earth seeking new sources of supply, willing and able to pay premium prices for them...

...and the country must dip deeply into its fast-shrinking reserves in order to remain economically solvent...

...They believed that the "advanced" nations, activated by exploding consumption patterns, would exhaust their domestic stocks of primary products (as, indeed, the Mesahi ore body was more or less exhausted...

...To free it from cocoa is not an overnight matter, and will not be done by the workings of the "free" market place...

...The easy hope for a self-nourishing wave of embourgeoisement, commencing in the West and coming naturally to enfold and enrich the whole earth, has been smashed by the diabolical ingenuity and prolificness of the technological revolution itself...

...Similarly, long-term programs— programs that do not incur a raging inflation—are harder and harder to get underway...

...The only way such nations can earn enough money to meet their immediate, indispensable obligations to their people is to press the development of their already established primary-product industries—cocoa, coffee, tin, copper...

...The advanced nations have the economic whip hand—no one questions that...

...About 45 per cent of Ghana's total revenue comes from cocoa...

...But the need must be met one day, and there is nothing in its nature, or its details, which makes it impossible to meet...

...At this point, it would be impossible to "restructure" the economy so as not to lean so heavily upon cocoa...

...The prospectors would discover the desired untapped resources in the hitherto "backward" and uneocploited regions of Africa and South America...

...An international economy so unjustly structured that billions of people fall farther behind every day in the search for decency, while the North Atlantic world continues to prosper, is not an acceptable working out of immutable "law"—as some American economists still persist in claiming...

...And since this cannot be expected of the ordinary market place, the job must be done by "administrative" purchase...

...Her husband is an editor at Macmillan and the author of The Death of Africa, published last year...

...But the poverty involved here is a "structural" poverty, not a "given" poverty...

...Ghana's capacity to produce cocoa has more than kept pace with its political aspirations and its booming population...

...Meanwhile, partly as a result of the high price of labor (which is what makes an "advanced" country advanced), the industry of the West has found it increasingly profitable to engage in sophisticated research and development programs that aim at replacing raw materials, produced by raw laborers, with synthetics and other substitutes...

...The need for profits, rather than simply the certainty of a supported price, is the reason why all attempts at voluntary stabilization by the primary producers themselves come to naught...

...NO TIME FOR COCOA By Susan and Peter Ritner Like EVERY other underdeveloped country in the world, with the exception of India, the people and Government of Ghana live oft the sale of a single "primary product"—that is, something dug from or grown in the ground...

...And this must be done soon...

...The money had to be dribbled out to meet the rising needs and expectations of a newly stimulated and burgeoning electorate—not because Prime Minister Kwarne Nkrumah is corrupt or inept, but because of the very nature of his historical situation...

...At present, too, there is a world surplus of oil, making it unprofitable for a new country like Nigeria, for example, to exploit the fields which once promised so much...

...In March 1961, after more than a decade of decline, the world price of cocoa hit a 12-year low, underscored by a bearish nearpanic on the New York Cocoa Exchange two months later...

...Bolivia can mine its tin only at a price about 50 per cent higher than the world market price...

...But any "stabilized" price that does not bring in a substantial profit is little better than no stabilization at all, because the underdeveloped countries desperately need profits in order to shake themselves free of their need for stabilization in the first place...

...Thus, though Ghana is working harder and harder on one of the very few money-earners available to it, the country has already slipped so far behind that it no longer possesses the resources to save itself...

...There is no other way: Ghana needs its earnings now...

...Of course, the means by which the ravaged non-Western nations will retaliate upon their tormentors will not be economic, any more than former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge's were...

...TWENTY YEARS AGO most economists predicted a very different course of events...

...Recently, the Aluminum Company of America's engineers announced the invention of a new process for refining aluminum from common clay, and the company's shareholders were urged by an influential U.S...

...Recent stabilization talks among cocoaproducing nations have fallen flat...

...To compound its difficulties, Ghana still faces the dismal prospect of preferential European Common Market tariffs, designed to favor the cocoa industries of its chief rivals...

...Therefore, the underdeveloped nations have to work harder and harder to earn less and less...

...This is not the poverty of natural scarcity (no one has begun to test the powers of the technological revolution, liberated from obsolete political and social inhibitions), nor the poverty of human self-indulgence (no one's life is more taxing than an African's...

...No great domestic savings and investment are to be expected from countries where the per capita income is less than $100 a year...

...Unfortunately, hard work in a difficult climate has not earned its proper reward in Ghana...

...Their choice is Hobson's choice—in Ghana's case, to keep on desperately producing cocoa, and to hope for the best...

...The international economy must be so organized that for a while all the cocoa Ghana can produce is purchased at "reasonable" prices...

...Such a moderate stabilization scheme is now being worked out by one of President Kennedy's task forces...

...In the long run what we want to do is to help create the kind of society liberal economists once thought would evolve as a natural consequence of a "balanced development program...

...An indigenous middle class would emerge, a class exercising increasing entrepreneurial initiative, and would gradually create in these countries the sort of enlightened producing-and-consuming milieu that the North Atlantic powers enjoy today...

...We in America know how the hypostasization of "economic law" can work out in a "backward" region...

...Synthetic substitutes have been devised...

...What we are suggesting is the establishment of an international institution to act for the advanced nations and serve as a commodity bank or something like it...

...With the first-class prices which the West would be forced to pay—so went the theory—the rulers of the "backward" regions could embark on big social investment programs in education, transportation, etc...

...25 for the next 10 years...

...But the underdeveloped countries, including Communist China, can turn to forms of political retaliation that will make the grindings of "economic law" look like a tea party...

...As we have noted, the American government is now on the point of announcing a commodity price-stabilization scheme...

...And behind all these figures there stand millions of men and women, anxious as never before to find a place in the "market-economy" of the West and to share the horizons of the modern era...

...Somehow, leaders and publicists are going to have to persuade the American people and Congress that the dry-as-dust statistics of commodity prices, and their steady world-wide decline in the face of growing social demands, are as stark and dramatic a challenge as summit meetings and armed conflicts...

...the "natural" price to prevail thereafter...

...It seems plausible, logical, optimistic and automatic...

...The general problem is poverty, as the Pope said recently, and as American Presidents have been repeating ever since the Point Four proposal...

...This year an even larger crop is expected, a continuing increase due not to rare "bumper" crops but to steadily improving agricultural techniques, new plant strains and control of the "swollen shoot" disease that threatened to destroy the entire industry only a few years ago...

...We must think again and again of relatively simple things: Most of the people of the world live on next to no survival margins...

...In Ghana today, it is cocoa or nothing...

...The scheme must operate so as to wean Ghana from dependence on cocoa, Senegal from peanuts, Katanga from copper, Bolivia from tin, Brazil from coffee, etc., by installing a graduated scale of crop-support payments in the mechanism...