When you think of chocolate, you may have several treats in mind. But, where does chocolate come from? In this unit, we focus our attention on another part of the world – Ghana! We explore the country, why this country is the second largest producer of cocoa beans, Fairtrade, how cocoa beans are traded in world markets and finally how the beans are made into chocolate that we enjoy. This term, students explored the relationship between chocolate and Fairtrade in Ghana. Students made connections between their lives and the lives of children in this part of the world, the effects of fairtrade on the people of Ghana, how chocolate is made, where in the world cocoa trees grow. Most importantly, students explored how  we are connected globally and how our actions here in Canada affect the people in other parts of the world.

Students will “travel” virtually to this part of the world and learn all about chocolate and Fairtrade.

Yenny’s post about the documentary:

The documentary was about an interesting subject to me. I didn’t even know about this kind of thing until I watched the documentary. The cocoa bean farmers are a hard working group of farmers, and so they deserve a large amount of money. The companies that buy the cocoa beans sometimes do not give the cocoa bean farmers a fair amount of money. This causes a big impact to the cocoa bean farmers. This is due to the fact that the farmers are very poor. For example, they need to walk miles and miles to get water from the well. The water, however, is not clean. The farmers in the documentary live in Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa bean producer, which is located in Africa. One of the farmers in Ghana said that once they got cheated from a big company that promised a lot of money but didn’t give the amount they had promised.

The tools the cocoa bean farmers use were new to most of us. The most simple one was a hook, situated on top of a long, carved, wood, which I suppose was drenched in water and left to dry in the sun for hours until it was finally strong and smooth enough to use. It wouldn’t be all that safe if the wood wasn’t carved, because then it would be possible to get a lot of splinters. Another useful tool was a small, dagger-like knife that is called a machete. I’m not too sure how to spell it, though. Anyway, this tool is used for cutting open the cocoa pods in order to get to the seed or bean. 

There are many steps to making chocolate from cocoa beans. The farmers first have to pick the cocoa pods from the tree using the long tool with a hook on top. After this task is completed, then they can go ahead a use the machete to open the pod. Then, they get the giant banana leaves and spread it on a long, wooden table. The farmers would then dry the seeds for a couple of days in the sun. I think one of the reasons that Ghana is such a good place to produce  cocoa beans is that there is a lot of sun and is very humid as well. The reason for this is that it is close to the equator. Back to the many steps of the cocoa-to-chocolate. After the seeds are dry, the farmers put it in bags, ready to be shipped to all the parts of the world.