The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana: A 'Field Economist' at Work

The migration of Asante cocoa farmers in Ghana started in 1892 and continued through the 1990s. The focus of Polly Hill’s path-breaking 1956 and 1963 books was migrant cocoa farmers as rural capitalists: merging farmer- entrepreneurs, economic agents who looked for opportunities and marshalled resources which they did not own to realize their goals. The field of entrepreneurship research has largely failed to develop an indigenous theory (Suddaby 2014), and so what may be described as Hill’s theory of indigenous entrepreneurial development in a rural setting is worth revisiting. As Keith Hart (2005: 31) wrote in his Guardian obituary of Hill, she

was an academic who pinpointed a unique class of African farming entrepreneurs ... She was able to show that the cocoa farmers were an authentic modern class, migrant entrepreneurs opening up virgin forest often in companies capable of hiring Swiss construction firms to develop the infrastructure that they needed and the colonial authorities could not provide. The latter were at first ignorant of what was going on. They thought the Gold Coast was a mining colony and only found out about the country’s cocoa exports when they had to account for a sudden rise in the level of imports.

Despite the varied definitions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, consensus in entrepreneurship studies stresses the purposeful and emergent action of entrepreneurs creating and taking opportunities in pursuit of wealth formation,^[1] and the migrant cocoa farmers studied by Hill clearly fit this characterization. They were self-reliant pioneers who not only opened up virgin rainforest (see Ruf (1995) on ‘forest rent’, the value of non-renewable soil fertility of land taken from the forest and newly planted with cocoa), but also single-handedly financed infrastructure development that they needed by contracting foreign firms to build roads and bridges that helped open up the rainforest and also made possible the shipment of cocoa from the hinterland to the port on the coast. Without the assistance, or even the knowledge, of the British colonial government of the time, the cocoa farmer-entrepreneurs developed a global industry that by 1945 made the Gold Coast the largest cocoa producer in the world (Hill 1956, 1957-1960, 1963, 1970). Gareth Austin (2005: 7, 457) cites Hill (1963) as the most famous and one of the earliest examples of work on the economy and economic history of West Africa that ‘tends to emphasize the rationality, agency and enterprise of indigenous economic actors, both before the colonial occupation and within the constraints of colonial economies’ (see also Hopkins 1973 and Austin 1997).

Hill’s emphasis on the migrant cocoa farmers as successful capitalist entrepreneurs was out of step with both the Pan-African socialist policies of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in the early 1960s and with many of her colleagues in the University of Ghana’s economics department in the Nkrumah era, as exemplified by Reginald Green and Ann Seidman’s Unity or Poverty? The Economics of Pan-Africanism (1968; see also Seidman 1978). The Nkrumah government’s disapproval of capitalists, its need for revenue for development projects, and its political base in ethnic groups other than the Asante (from whom the migrant cocoa farmers were primarily drawn) led to a policy of depressing the prices paid by the government’s monopoly cocoa marketing board well below the world price of cocoa, creating incentive problems that reduced Ghana from being the world’s largest producer of cocoa to its third largest.

As John Tosh (1991: 20-21) observes (citing Gray and Birmingham 1970),

When Britain’s African empire was at its zenith during the early twentieth century, her imperial morale was sustained by the notion that Africans were economically feckless and passive. In fact in the late nineteenth century the continent had been traversed by far-flung indigenous trade-routes linking the interior with the coast, and most of the food requirements of the towns which later sprang up in the wake of the colonial occupation were met by African peasant farmers responding quickly to market opportunities. Yet the mythical stereotype of economic ineptitude persists, and it contributes to the often specious authority with which outside experts pronounce on Africa’s development needs today, with such disastrous results.

Save that she firmly rejected the description of African farmers as peasants rather than capitalist-entrepreneurs, Hill (1956, 1962, 1963, 1970, 1986a) similarly (and starting earlier) made a strong empirical case for the active agency of African farmers, for their responsiveness to market opportunities, and against the stereotypes held by outside experts (see also Garlick (1959, 1971), Meillassoux (1971), and Ruf (1995)). She gave particular attention and recognition to the active economic agency of African, and in particular Ghanaian, women (Chapter 13 of Hill (1986a) denounced ‘The Neglect of Women’), a theme developed further by subsequent scholars (e.g. Simms 1981; Robertson 1984).

Contrary to the claim by W. Arthur Lewis (1953) that indigenous systems of property rights impeded economic development, Hill argued that the flexibility of the indigenous land tenure system, especially in the Eastern Province of the Gold Coast colony (less so in Asante itself), supported the growth of cocoa farming. Firmin-Sellers (1996) contended that the Gold Coast failed to establish secure property rights, and that, as Lewis had claimed, this impeded agricultural investment. Austin (2005: 344-345) concludes in favour of Hill rather than Lewis and Firmin-Sellers, because

there was no compelling economic need for stranger farmers to be able to buy land outright when they could obtain use rights for land on which to plant trees that would last for decades ... Paradoxically, the more complex political economy approach proposed by Firmin-Sellers seems to miss the main story: one of economic success.^[2]

• [1] See Schumpeter (1911 [1934]), Shane and Venkataraman (2000), Alvarez and Barney (2007), Dimov(2011), Alvarez et al. (2013), and also Margaret Katzin (1964) on the role of the small entrepreneur inAfrica and Rachel Simms (1981) on African women as entrepreneurs.
• [2] See Austin (2005: 532, fn. 74) for references to the studies on which he based his conclusion.