An Iconic Consumer Brand At A Bargain Price
Plus An Energy Drink Maker Joins The List
| This is Porter & Co.’s Best Buys, which we publish monthly as part of Porter Stansberry’s Complete Investor (formerly called The Big Secret On Wall Street). We produce Complete Investor every Thursday at 4 pm ET. Once a month, we provide our paid-up subscribers a full report on a stock recommendation, and also a monthly extensive review of the current portfolio… You can go here to see the full Complete Investor portfolio… and here to see past Best Buys. If you’re not yet a subscriber to Complete Investor, to access the full paid issue, the portfolio, Best Buys, and all of our insights and recommendations, please click here. |
The knife slid through both of Akyea Mensah’s cheeks, pinning his mouth shut.
It was the most crucial part of the ritual killing. This way, he’d be unable to scream for help… unable to utter “NTAM,” the universally recognized tribal safe word that would halt the killing… and most importantly, unable to curse the assassins’ families or call down black magic on their heads.
Silence was key.
After the cheek-pinning, the murder moved quickly. A crowd of Akyeah’s royal relatives – all part of Ghana’s ruling Akyem clan – hoisted him onto an empty throne and drained his blood, baptizing the seat in preparation for the incoming chief. The old chief, Ofori Atta, had died – and his rightful successor needed to make a blood offering before he could assume the throne.
Akyea Mensah’s part in the traditional Wirempe ceremony, though, was over. The group dismembered him and deposited his body in a canal, where it wouldn’t be found for another five months.
As far as the Akyem clan was concerned, the case was closed.
The British colonial government didn’t feel the same way.
By 1944 – the year of the Akyeah Mensah murder – an increasingly large divide had grown between the tribal chieftains on Ghana’s Gold Coast and the occupying British government, who’d been in charge since 1901. The English ruled high-handedly from a castle in the coastal city of Accra, imposing European-style law on an unruly collection of tribal states, and “sending in a Commission” to iron out problems when they arose.
A dismembered man in a canal was clearly a problem… to the Brits, anyway. Not so to Ghanaian Dr. J. B. Danquah, the lawyer for the defense.
Danquah – himself an educated member of the Akyem clan – was a champion of the old ways. He believed the native chiefs and farmers had a right to their own customs (up to and including the occasional ritual human sacrifice).
He assembled a crack legal team – not so much to defend murder, but to show the Brits that they couldn’t push his countrymen around. In a rather impressive show of denial, Danquah vowed to prove “there was strong evidence that the murder never was. And… that Akyea Mensah committed suicide by hanging himself.”
The Crown was not impressed by Danquah’s “Mensah hanged himself” speech. After a grueling sequence of appeals and counter-appeals, the strong arm of British law prevailed. Three of the murderers were executed and four sentenced to life in prison.
Disgusted, Danquah threatened: “If the white man is going to kill us, the white man will go back to his country.” Less than a month after the 1947 guilty verdict, he started a grassroots political party, the United Gold Coast Convention (“UGCC”), to fight for the rights of native chiefs and farmers.
By then, the farmers especially needed a champion. In return for the Crown’s protection, the British exploited Ghana’s lucrative cocoa farms, and in Danquah’s view, that just couldn’t go on.
Magic Beans
By the 1930s, chocolate was big business for big-name companies like Mars and Cadbury. And the lucky English – as rulers of Ghana – had a corner on the world’s single largest exporter of cocoa beans.
They bought cocoa at rock-bottom prices from the small farmers on the Ghana coast, shipped it overseas, and sold it to fancy chocolate companies at an exorbitant markup. All of which went to the English, of course.
By the time Danquah came on the scene, cocoa had become a lightning rod for the conflict between the civilized colonials and the unlettered natives. Danquah and his fellow agitators felt that the native farmers weren’t getting a fair shake and that they should be able to sell their own cocoa overseas and pocket the markup. The English colonists – and Big Chocolate – strongly disagreed.
The standoff got so bad that at several points in the 1930s, the farmers went on strike and burned huge swathes of cocoa plants rather than participate in the global cocoa industry. (This was not when hot chocolate was invented, by the way.)
The most impressive of these strikes, the 1937-8 Cocoa Hold-Up, went on for eight months and pushed world cocoa sales down as much as 90%, egged on by Danquah.
The English, as was their wont, sent in a Commission (the Nowell Commission, this time) to investigate. It was Mr. William Nowell’s studied opinion that the English should allow the Gold Coast farmers to form their own “Cocoa Marketing Board,” which would permit them to set their own prices for cocoa beans, thus defusing the tension.
After a few years of negotiations, in 1947 the Cocoa Marketing Board was officially launched, seemingly a political victory for Danquah and his newly-formed UGCC party.
Really, though, it was a victory only on paper.
The Board was ostensibly run “by the people,” but before long, the uneducated cocoa farmers got pushed out. The main folks with a say were elite city-dwelling natives.
Chief among these city slickers was Kwame Nkrumah, who would end up running – and winning – the election to become Ghana’s first Prime Minister when the country finally gained independence from Britain in 1958.
Danquah – seeing the native chiefs and farmers still weren’t getting a fair piece of the chocolate bar – protested. He tried setting up several rival “Farmers Only” cocoa marketing boards, but couldn’t get traction. As a last-ditch effort, he ran against Nkrumah in Ghana’s first election, and lost.
And a few years later, in 1965, he was thrown into Nsawam Prison on trumped-up charges and died of a “heart attack” (that’s the official story, anyway).
Board To Tears
With the formidable Danquah out of the way, the ancient voices of the chieftains grew fainter. The newly-formed Ghanaian government, and of course, the increasingly urban-composed Cocoa Marketing Board – remained firmly controlled by educated city elites.
As for the small cocoa farmers, they got the short end of the Tootsie roll once more. As one Ghanaian newspaper columnist lamented, “The lamp of the cocoa farmers has been extinguished! And people still do what they like with the cocoa farmers’ money!”
To this day, Ghana’s farmers still don’t have a say in the price of their chocolate. Ghana is currently the only country where the state controls the entire volume of its exports. Every year, the government-run Cocoa Marketing Board – which has gone through a few iterations and is now known as COCOBOD – sets the prices for cocoa at the beginning of the year and farmers are forced to comply.
COCOBOD is a mercurial – and frequently corrupt – master…
From its very earliest days – not long after the British Nowell Commission first suggested it – COCOBOD butted in with city-boy agricultural recommendations that sounded good on paper, but didn’t work well for real-life cocoa farmers.
As time went on, COCOBOD became the unwelcome “homeowners’ association” of cocoa farmers. Its ham-handed dictates continued, and as political alliances swirled and shifted, it frequently diverted funds that were supposed to go toward fertilizer and farm improvements, instead lining the pockets of government cronies.
All that drama factors directly into chocolate prices every year – because almost one-fifth of the world’s raw cocoa still comes directly from Ghana, and is still dictated by this draconian, secretive, pseudo-colonial chocolate monopoly. Every chocolate bar you buy at the grocery store might as well have COCOBOD stamped on it in tiny letters.
Over the past several years, for instance, cocoa production took a drastic dip (a 40% decline over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025) due to an extended episode of COCOBOD skulduggery around fertilizer…
As COCOBOD itself admitted in a press release, hundreds of tons of fertilizer intended for Ghana’s cocoa farms was “lost,” stolen, or sold on the black market for political purposes, which left farms vulnerable to the swollen shoot virus. By 2023, the mealybugs that carry the disease had devastated around 40% of Ghana’s active cocoa farms – causing a ripple effect of imitation chocolate that you may have noticed on the labels of your Halloween candies.
That, in turn, has caused chocolate prices to rise, depressing many major candy companies. The good news is that this depression, as always, is temporary (COCOBOD giveth and COCOBOD taketh away). The multibillion-dollar cocoa industry is cyclical, and these price spikes are typically short: high prices spur reinvestment, replanting, and government stabilization efforts, leading to a supply rebound within a couple of years.
In the meantime, the dip gives us an opportunity to buy into one of the world’s best chocolate manufacturers at an attractive price point.
If you’re not already a subscriber to Best Buys, call our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447, for more information on getting access to this publication.
This content is only available for paid members.
If you are interested in joining Porter & Co. either click the button below now or call our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895.