Agricultural luxury goods are one area where it’s hard to continually push a monopoly advantage.
That said, I think that if Ghana can take the short term repercussions, then the country will come out ahead. It can become to chocolate, what France is to wine. But that would require heavy marketing in order to change people’s perception about what kind of chocolate is most delicious.
So European companies setup plantations?
But yes, Swiss chocolate manufacturers have some options: a) setup a processing plant in Ghana, b) increase production somewhere else, c) reduce usage..
Maybe more.
The second question is: Is there any reason cocoa can't be grown elsewhere, or the second biggest producer can't increase production?
It may be possible to use artificial techniques to grow it elsewhere, but I'm assuming it's not economically viable or you get a product with worst quality in the end
> Ghana doesn't have all of the layers of industry necessary to support development and export of products i.e. there are no market buyers at any reasonable price.
Per the article, they literally control half of the world's cocoa. This means they get to define what "a reasonable price" is, as long as the rest of the world wants to keep its chocolate plentiful.
I'm not a politician or economist - but to me, it seems obvious the plan here is to bootstrap domestic cocoa processing industries, get the current exporters to sell cocoa to domestic producers, and export processed products (like chocolate). They're not going to just stop cultivating cocoa - being in control of half of the supply of raw materials for a highly prized product is their one big leverage on the international market.
As to not having the necessary industry base to pull it off - the question is, how fast can they build one? I'd guess a couple of years, if no foreign powers try to make it hard for them.