The University Of Sheffield

Summary of Findings

The general focus of the thesis is the post-colonial era. On a discursive level, however, the EU-devised trade system was a conduit, as it was originally designed to be, for the extension of the paternalistic relationship that existed between Europe and Africa in the colonial period (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014; Cosgrove, 1969). The duty to develop, which was inflected by the civilising mission of the 19^th century and informed the colonial mission of the post-1939 period, was extended beyond the colonial era under the terms and provisions of the trade and development system. This is the basis of the fourth chapter. In its integration project, the EU imposed upon itself the duty to develop the (former) colonies. Nevertheless, this discursive extension does not necessarily translate into an extension of the colonial economic system.

The study has no single unified empirical methodology: as the trade systems are dynamic, a static method of analysis cannot be applied. The first of the empirical chapters (Chapter Five) compares Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, on the basis that the former was outside the trade system and the latter was within it. The two countries share an export product – cocoa beans – and have a similar economic structure. The mandate of Chapter Five is to show that the EEC trade system was a system of extraversion that prevented politically induced diversification and economic change. In Ghana, only four years after independence, a crisis in world cocoa prices threatened the political survival of ruling elites (Harringan and Younger, 2000, 191; Herbst, 1993, 19). The Nkrumah government responded by creating a scheme to diversify away from cocoa. As this was done to ensure their political survival, it fits Peter Evans’s submission. Attempts to diversify away from cocoa production occurred in 1961, 1965 and 1970/71, all prompted by a reduction in cocoa prices and the consequent threat to ruling elites. This pattern was present in all West African countries that were not associated with the Yaoundé trade system. For example, the ruling elites in Guinea diversified into minerals when commodity prices dropped in 1960/1961 (World Bank, 1966, 12).

In Côte d’Ivoire, on the other hand, ruling elites used the Yaoundé Convention to guarantee the existing economic system through a system of price support and market preferences. As export products such as cocoa, coffee, bananas and pineapples received price support; Côte d’Ivoire evaded the threat faced by Ghana and Guinea (Alschuler, 1988, 96). Coffee alone received price support amounting to roughly 50 percent above the world-market level in the first half of the 1960s (Lawson, 1975, 207; World Bank, 1963, 10). This system of extraversion insulated the ruling elites of Côte d’Ivoire from the threat that would have otherwise arisen in the absence of the trade advantages. There was thus a divergence between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that extended to other West African countries.

However, as former British colonies joined the trade system in 1975, products that were not part of the Yaoundé Convention became part of the protection scheme under the Lomé trade system. The inclusion of new protected products under the Lomé Convention affected resource allocation in former French colonies (Ravenhill, 1985). Sugar is the example used in this study. A sugar protocol was created under the Lomé Convention, comprising a quota system wherein the EC promised to pay more than world-market prices for ACP sugar. Whilst this protocol broadly reflected the extraversion policy under the Yaoundé Convention and French colonial policy in the late 1950s, the introduction of the sugar scheme (borrowed from the British Commonwealth sugar program) was new to the former French colonies. Therefore, only three years after the Lomé Convention, 66 massive sugar complexes were in construction in ACP, of which six were planned in Côte d’Ivoire. The allocation of resources to sugar production turned out to be an instance of misallocation, causing crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. The sugar case shows the distortion of economic incentives in West African countries, whose ruling elites used the EU’s provisions to select sectors for investment/development.

Similarly, the government of Ghana in the 1980s allocated resources to banana, pineapple and coffee production (Whitefield et al., 2015), following the protection pattern established under the Lomé Convention. Researchers assessing this selection of sectors (in relation to local factor endowment, for example) have hardly ever considered the influence of the EC trade system. For example, the World Bank condemned the decision of Côte d’Ivoire to allocate resources into sugar production in 1976-78 and blamed the country’s economic crisis of the 1980s on the “ill-conceived sugar program” (World Bank, 1981, 21). However, the Bank failed to acknowledge the clear link between the Lomé trade provisions and the sugar-development schemes in West African countries at large. In addition to the sugar misallocation, the Lomé Convention extended suboptimal sectors in Côte d’Ivoire and created new suboptimal sectors in Ghana.

At the same time, the main export product of both countries (cocoa beans) reached the point of diminishing returns, and received vigorous protection by the EC through preferences and price support. This protection led in part to the extension of cocoa cultivation into a phase of post-diminishing returns. Cocoa and coffee beans were the products most vigorously promoted under the price-stability schemes of the Lomé Convention (Hewitt, 1983; Aiello, 2002; Martin, 2002, 26). The promise of STABEX (price stabilisation) did not always materialise; from the 1980s, only a fraction of the promised price support was provided. However, the EC disbursed funds to cocoa and coffee according to demand. Between 1975 and 1998, Côte d’Ivoire received more than 17 percent of the entire STABEX funding, due to its concentration on cocoa (Aiello, 2012, 13). Following the drop in the world-market price of cocoa in the mid-1980s, the government of Côte d’Ivoire paid more than world-market prices to domestic planters in expectation of reimbursement from the EC.

As cocoa is the most important export product of both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, it is the subject of a general case study to demonstrate the problem of diminishing returns. As documented in the case study, cocoa production has historically been determined by the availability of forestland. Planters tend to migrate to new forest areas or diversify into new products after the exhaustion of forestland. The thesis shows that cocoa production in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire has reached the point of diminishing returns, and that intensive production is currently underway. In Ghana, the government and NGOs established various channels for deflating the adverse consequences of diminishing returns (which in the 1970s/1980s had caused a decline in cocoa production). Through the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), the government sponsors the mass spraying of cocoa farms and distributes/subsidises fertilisers.

In Côte d’Ivoire, diminishing returns has led to an increase in poverty among cocoa planters, and cost-saving practices/technologies such as child/forced/slave labour are now widespread. Post-forest cultivation in the cocoa sector is not altogether the result of the trade system between the EU and West African countries, although the trade system is a major contributing factor. The centralised nature of the cocoa sector in West African countries is the main reason for post-forest cultivation. As the state receives most of its internal revenue from the cocoa sector, the government considers diversification as a threat to revenue, and thus uses tactics such as the manipulation of kinship networks, local power structures and prices to reverse the historical process of post-forest diversification (e.g. mass spraying and fertiliser distribution in Ghana). NGOs and international financial institutions usually support the post-forest farming of cocoa, which is also promoted by the protection of the cocoa sector under the EU trade system (via trade preferences, aid disbursement and price support).

The case study of cocoa is a major contribution of the thesis, although this was unplanned. The relevance of the cocoa case is not only that ruling elites have used trade advantages to protect the industry, but that –more importantly –in light of diminishing returns, West African countries must sooner or later diversify away from cocoa beans. The EPA (the latest manifestation of the EU’s trade relationship with West African countries) greatly reduces the possibility of diversification and thus indirectly promotes the continuation of cocoa production into a post-diminishing returns phase.

Chapter Seven provides an assessment of the most recent incarnation of the trade system, the EPA. There is currently no empirical basis for studying the EPA, because it was signed only recently and has not yet been fully implemented. As argued in this chapter, the EU used the leverage of existing trade preferences and market advantages (those of the Lomé Convention) to induce West African ruling elites to enter the free-trade system. The preferential price and market advantages provided under the Lomé Convention, which formed the basis of sectors such as cocoa (especially processed cocoa), bananas, pineapples and fish, were slated to end (following a challenge by the WTO and the EU’s desire to alter its trading regime with the former colonies), and the EPA was introduced as a replacement. In itself, however, the EPA entails trade liberalisation that greatly threatens some local industries in West African countries. The chapter shows that the market advantages (trade preferences and price advantages) that the EPA was signed to preserve are currently shrinking due to market liberalisation in the EU (via the WTO’s liberalisation commitment and changes in the GSP and FTAs), resulting in an increased need to diversify. Diversification, however, is significantly curtailed by the terms of the EPA.

In Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the reduction in EU trade preferences has already completely eradicated the pineapple sector, and is gradually destroying the banana export sector (due to the uncompetitiveness of the West African banana sector relative to top banana suppliers) and reducing the volume of fishery exports. The reduction in preferences may not lead to the destruction of the cocoa sector, because West African countries are the main suppliers of cocoa beans worldwide. But cocoa production faces problems of a different nature that also make diversification important. The need to diversify is also paramount in Nigeria following the recent decrease in the price of crude oil. The effect of the EPA on diversification is therefore very important.

By definition, the EPA prevents diversification in West African countries into products in which the EU has a production advantage (mature sectors) or a production interest (production induced through subsidies). However, an exclusion list (covering 25 percent of imports from the EU) features in the provisions of the EPA. In principle, therefore, ECOWAS can use the exclusion list for future diversification plans. Yet this chapter shows that the exclusion list does not offer the potential for diversification, for two reasons. First, the list reflects the desire of West African countries to protect existing production systems against the possibility of increased importation from the EU, which could destroy local production units. Second, the exclusion list has led to a process of regional obstruction whereby the product or products nominated by one country for protection against imports from the EU become the basis for resource allocation in other countries. For example, Côte d’Ivoire selected chicken for exclusion from liberalisation due to a perceived regional advantage in this product, but after the regional signing of the EPA other West African countries invested in chicken production (seizing the opportunity for regional protection), thereby shrinking Côte d’Ivoire’s advantage and market possibility. The same has occurred in most of the excluded products.