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Description

Large (40 x 30 inch) advertising poster, illustrating the process by which Cocoa was produced for export in Ghana.

Our research suggests that the poster was published in the 1950s to promote Cadbury Bournville Cocoa.

Cadbury established its first cocoa production in Ghana in about 1909, after a boycott on Portuguese cocoa began. The European chocolate industry began to purchase the majority of its cocoa from Ghana.  In 1909 the first year of the boycott, Ghana had only been growing cocoa for about twenty years. Before 1900, the country was a very small player in international distribution and would have been incapable of handling the volume of cocoa demanded by the major players in the industry. But in the years that followed the boycott of Angola and its islands, when Cadbury and the other major chocolate manufacturers began to rely heavily on Ghana for their beans, the country became the single largest cocoa producing country in the world. 

Ghana was still a British colony, and while a few farmers were able to experience moderate financial success, the majority remained impoverished and largely unaffected by the profits that their work was producing for the nation.