From Firestone to Michelin, a history of rubber cultivation in a cocoa-growing country: Ghana

In Ghana, many cocoa and coconut farmers started to adopt rubber in the 1990s and 2000s. Public policies played a major role in the diversification process. What were the other factors in this success? Combined with a transparent mechanism to fix procurement prices paid to the farmer, world prices have led to a dramatic increase in incomes. Subsequently, since 2012, despite the collapse of the world price of rubber, this mechanism has also proven to be a strong defence against the rapid erosion of the national currency's value. This is not so for cocoa, where farmers deal with a fixed price in Cedis. This helps to explain the strong confidence placed in rubber cultivation in Ghana at the expense of cocoa. Diversification is also viewed as a structural response to decades of monoculture. Regardless of whether it was cocoa or coconut, each region that adopted rubber witnessed the signs of fatigue and wear in these quasi-monoculture systems. (Résumé d'auteur)