By Alex Ababio
The Forgotten Hands
In a quiet village in Asunafo, Ghana, 58-year-old Adwoa Akyaa gently touches the bark of a tall Ofram tree standing strong on her cocoa farm. She doesn’t see it as just a tree. “These trees are like our children,” she says softly. “We planted and cared for them to protect the cocoa—but now, strangers are selling the air they breathe.”
She is talking about the carbon credits that companies are selling in her name, without her knowledge or consent.
Adwoa works hard on her 15-acre cocoa farm. With the help of these trees, she’s increased her cocoa harvest by 50%. But her carbon earnings for the whole year? Just $14.72. Meanwhile, big chocolate companies in Europe are making over $120 million by trading carbon credits from trees like hers.
Adwoa is one of 140,000 cocoa farmers in Ghana who joined the REDD+ program. It promised that farmers would get paid for protecting trees and reducing deforestation. But in her region, Western North, nearly 92% of farmers have no formal land documents. Because of this, their trees don’t count in the digital systems used to trade carbon. They are left out.
How Farmers Are Made Invisible
1. The Satellite Problem
In Sefwi-Wiawso, cocoa farmer Kofi Mensah shakes his head. “My grandfather’s grave marks our land,” he says, pointing at the edge of his farm. “But the satellite says it’s forest encroachment.”
Many cocoa farms in Ghana are mapped by satellites and AI programs used by companies like Satelligence and Circularise. These systems only understand exact GPS maps. But in real life, Ghanaian farmers use natural landmarks like rivers, hills, or sacred trees to mark land boundaries. These don’t appear in the digital maps.
As a result, 62% of farms in Sefwi-Wiawso are wrongly labeled as “uncultivated” or “unmapped”—even though people have farmed them for generations. The tools sent to help them—like GPS tablets—often break in the rainforest humidity and need reading skills that 70% of farmers do not have.
2. The Carbon Cartel
In 2023, Ghana received $4.8 million for reducing nearly 1 million tons of carbon emissions. But very little of that money reached the farmers who did the work.
On average, each farmer got just $0.84. The rest of the money went to:
Companies doing satellite audits (about $250,000 per project)
Blockchain fees (15% per transaction)
Tech firms adjusting algorithms to remove small farmers, calling them “too risky”
“Farmers do all the hard work of capturing carbon,” says Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, Director of Climate Change at Ghana’s Forestry Commission. “But they don’t get the rewards. The systems were built for profit, not fairness.”
Blood Cocoa and Hidden Pain
Near the village of Asempaneye, smoke rises from cocoa fields where children work beside their parents. Some children miss school to help clean diseased cocoa pods. Their families are too poor to pay school fees, which cost around $300 a year.
Ama Nyantakyi, a widow from the Bekwai Cluster, puts it clearly:
“No carbon money ever came to us. My son works with me after school. Should I choose between his future and his hunger?”
Even though COCOBOD, Ghana’s cocoa board, says 60% of its farms are certified sustainable, field reports show a different truth:
European tech companies take up to 80% of the carbon credit value, saying it’s for “monitoring”
Shade trees planted by farmers are added to blockchain systems without their permission
AI systems label farms near forest areas as “high risk”, cancelling their credits—but allow big firms cutting down trees to go unchecked
Standing Up to the System
Fighting Back with Pen and Paper
In Offinso Municipality, farmers are starting to resist.
The Kuapa Kokoo cooperative doesn’t trust the digital systems. Instead, they use old-fashioned methods—writing in notebooks, using strings to measure tree size, and phone cameras to take pictures.
Yaw Boateng, a member of the group, explains how these simple records helped them negotiate better deals. “We got paid four times more than what the blockchain systems offered,” he says.
Yaa Asantewaa, a 67-year-old elder, adds proudly
“They say we’re illiterate. But we know our trees. We wrap our arms around them to measure their carbon.”
Broken Promises from the Government
Ghana’s 1999 Land Policy promised that farmers would receive legal land titles by 2020. But in Sunyani, local chiefs still ask for $200 as “drinks money” before giving out land rights. This keeps farmers in a state of uncertainty—and makes it easy for companies to use their carbon without sharing the profits.
The GHG Accounting Standard, built with help from the World Cocoa Foundation and tech companies, now excludes customary land ownership from carbon calculations. That means many farmers will never qualify for carbon credits—even if they are preserving forests.
The $120 Million Illusion
Late at night in Accra’s financial district, bright screens show carbon trading numbers climbing. Each one represents carbon stored in trees like Adwoa Akyaa’s—but she has no idea how to read a blockchain token. She’s never even been inside an air-conditioned bank or tasted a latte.
The painful truth?
The same technology that claims to help farmers is actually erasing them. Satellites flying over their heads, computers in Europe, and reports filled with green words are all turning their hard work into a business that only benefits the rich.
And as the EU’s strict new Deforestation Law (EUDR) comes into effect in December 2025, over 640,000 Ghanaian farmers might be blocked from the very markets their trees help sustain.
A Ray of Hope
But not all is lost.
Inside the Kuapa Kokoo meeting hall, something new is being born. Farmers are creating a “BioCredit DAO”—a digital platform powered by solar energy. It lets farmers verify their own tree data and sell carbon credits directly to chocolate buyers.
“We’ll sell straight to people who love chocolate,” says Yaw Boateng, drawing lines on a clay map. “No tech tricks. No more ghosts stealing our work.”
The Last Word
The world needs to decide: will it continue to enjoy “green” chocolate while the people behind it remain poor? Or will it finally pay attention to the truth behind the labels?
In Kuapa Kokoo’s ledger, one message is written in bold letters “When spiders unite, they can tie up a lion.”
And in Ghana’s cocoa villages, the spiders are starting to spin their web.