West African Plantation Crops

European elites organized the production of plantation export crops in the Third World by using the benefits of tropical climates, abundant and cheap land, and cheap "forced" labor. 

1) What were and still are two common export crops?  
2) Which crop requires a drier climate?
3) Which crop is mainly produced in which former European colony?

Examine the distribution of the money from the final price of chocolate, which is made from cocoa.

Producers in the South are paid only a tiny part of the final price. A few corporations in the North dominate most of the market.

DuPont, a US corporation, has patented an enzyme that could produce a substitute for cocoa butter and leave many cocoa farmers out of work. Cocoa contributes up to 40 percent of Ghana's foreign-exchange earnings and about 600,000 farmers depend on this crop -- mostly smallholders now -- and each farm supports an average of 15 people [New Internationalist, May 2000, p. 6]. Ivory Coast, another West African country, supplies 43 percent of the world's cocoa under terrible working conditions: children are purchased from destitute parents, forced to work 12 hours a day, regularly beaten, inadequately fed, and locked up at night. Some of these slave children are as young as 9 years [Utne, Nov-Dec 2002, p. 29]. Alternatives to "slave"-produced chocolates are organic cocoa beans and fair trade chocolate from cooperatives.

Read about the abuse of workers on the Firestone rubber plantations in Liberia.

Answers:
1) crops: groundnuts or peanuts are used to make cooking oil and cocoa for making chocolate
2) Drier climates: groundnuts are found closer to the Sahel and Sahara Desert
3) Groundnuts in the former French colonies, cocoa in the former British colonies

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Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 February 1996; last revised on 23 October 2006.