Shea, a curse or a blessing?
The countryside in (northern) Ghana: Bolgatanga, Navrongo
The sun blasts over the red earth; temperatures are between 25 and 40 °C. During the rainy season the heavens open their floodgates and the rain comes down for hours. Rivers swell and the adjacent lands become inundated. In the dry season water is scarce and only if a village is lucky it has a well. If not, long distances have to be covered on foot. Green trees are spread at regular intervals across the plain. Every 500 meters a mud structure is visible, sometimes with a tin roof but some still have the traditional reed covering. A majority of the houses have no electricity.
Aboku the village female “elder”
This is where Aboku lives. Close to the shea butter processing facility, a rectangular brick structure with a tin roof, she walks up there every morning. The well of the cooperative does not work; the borehole was not drilled deep enough. Traditional villages do not exist — just scattered single houses. There is a community, however, with “elders”, who have a say in everything, and I had to pay them a visit (with some presents) . Aboku lives alone as her husband had died. She is over 60 but never answered my question as to her exact age. In this community she is the most respected woman, and “elder” to all women and pivotal to the cooperative.
Local women make the butter
When there is demand, the cooperative springs into action. Other women come to help and up to three batches of 25 kg of oil can be produced. Everything is done by hand, though the facility has meanwhile acquired some essential machines. The machines are sometimes down for repair, or simply when the power is cut. Power cuts come and go unpredictably. The women are very careful to remove bad nuts and pick them by hand.
Weaving as a cottage industry
Apart from shea, the villagers’ income comes from their crops and the occasional odd job; weaving is another way of making money. Just as in pre-industrial Europe, it is done here in the home. A patron supplies the weaving gear and the yarn, and the women are paid by the square metre of fabric produced. This is much how the peasants of northern France and England earned their subsistence before they were bypassed by the industrial looms — remember the French weavers who, as the story goes, threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the new machines to wreck them, giving us the word “sabotage”. Two hundred years on, in Ghana it still works the same way.
Shea butter, what is it?
Shea oil (or butter as it solidifies at 26 °C) is a remarkable product. It consists of olein and stearin but also contains 8 percent active substances that are beneficial to the skin. Basically one jar of shea butter covers all needs. Despite this, many cosmetics contain (some) shea for technical but mostly marketing reasons. Ghana is the biggest exporter of the butter and, tragically, also of the shea nuts. This is where the curse begins: nuts are processed elsewhere, so the added value of making the butter does not stay in the villages.
Ghana Black Soap, a by product
The shea oil that is not good enough is used for cooking but can also be used to make the traditional Ghana Black Soap, where the oil is saponified with lye water derived from the ashes of burnt shea shells – rich in KOH. The resulting soap is used locally but there is a big market for Black Soap also (again… the prices are low).
Government restrictions only work partially
There are some government restrictions on export, but the trade continues, robbing the village women of their extra income. Throughout the supply chain, too, the small village producers have a weak bargaining position, often forcing them to sell below cost price even though some of them produce grade A material that is exported at twice the price. At the time of writing, the cost price of shea butter was 65 cedi per kg, the export price 80–100, while the villages were often paid just 45.
Harvests under pressure due to climate change
On top of this, the shea trees, the lifeline of the village women, are under attack. Climate change has caused a shift in seasons. When the shea tree blooms, it is getting hot and dry, so the bloom has no chance. No bloom means no nuts. The trees are also getting older, and there is no program to renew them on a sufficient scale. The government tries, but there are not enough new trees to plant. Furthermore, for lack of fuel the trees are cut down for firewood and it is the best trees that go first. So the goose that lays the golden eggs is being slaughtered.
Market access is a big problem
All in all, the cooperative is in a struggle for survival. Finding customers who appreciate the high quality (grade A) is difficult, as the cooperative lies far up north, hundreds of kilometres from the capital, Accra. Now and then a good client appears through connections in the USA, but there are too few of them, and traders pay far too little for the women to earn an honest wage.
Some NGOs, of course, do good work supporting cooperatives and acting as fair-trade partners selling the shea on the world market. The intentions are good, but even these NGOs buy well below cost price from producers outside their networks.(Savannah Fruit buys at 45 cedi, well below the costprice of 65).
Structural faults in the supply chain
The real problem is more or less hidden: large buyers tend to buy the nuts directly from the villages. The nuts are then processed in third countries, where production is more efficient (though the quality is generally not that of the village’s grade A butter). Thus the local added value is lost, nut prices rise, and demand for finished shea butter falls. Though the government tries to stop the export of unprocessed nuts, and has even capped the price, the practice simply continues. A total ban would boost demand for finished butter — and with it, prices.
Aboku feels all this economic pressure in her daily life. Less shea butter production means less income. A failed nut harvest is even more devastating. The rosy story of shea, so often told in YouTube clips and cosmetics magazines, rarely includes this harsh reality.
A potential blessing turned into a curse…
