Ghana will no longer sell cocoa to Switzerland

No more swiss piss? Thanks china!

Good for them I guess or is it? I don't understand how you cannot have prosparity from selling raw materials?

If you think you're not being paid enough, increase the price along with creating your own products. It seems weird to me to not let foreign countries buy your raw materials just because you want to produce more stuff yourself.

It's not like I will start buying chocolate made in ghana because they don't want to sell their cocoa anymore. I will still buy from the brands I like and are used to most of the times, which is a local brand.

Feels like a pretty confused article, diving back and forth between cocoa and coronavirus vaccines even while saying they're unrelated.

Building up local industry sounds like a good approach for the long term (though, contra the article, inevitably at a short term cost); the simplistic free trade arguments discount the value of developing industry within the country. A ban is a very blunt instrument though; a tariff (perhaps gradually increasing over time) seems like a better approach that would help the country gradually transition while avoiding shocks.

Explain LID [0] which is effectively a tax applied to every ton of cocoa sold of which most is paid to the farmers.

However I think Ghana is in the wrong here because extorting other nations to give them anything free of charge by withholding trade goods will simply means that the trade goods will eventually be sourced elsewhere.

Regardless what you think about rich vs poor, medicine vs goods, and such, IP is property and using a world wide organization to deprive another of their rights is never a good idea. (no whataboutism please). Yes it is medicine, yes it is important, but that does not mean it has to be free. It should be something that can be negotiated but going nuclear in trade never benefits anyone and usually affects the poorest of world the most.

My suggestion, just up the LID

[0]https://www.uncommoncacao.com/blog/2020/10/20/the-lid-in-gha...

I wish them success, but my prediction is that in a few years they'll have no successful products and the world's chocolate makers have found new suppliers. You can't just make a decision to create successful products.