ABSTRACT
It is one of the misfortunes of contemporary Africa that the business of farming is usually referred to so slightingly and contemptuously, especially by economists. Many present-day writers take for granted that the so-called 'small peasants' who produce the food and export crops are invariably, in certain broad and important senses, 'inefficient'. There is much too much of a tendency to consider yield per acre as the measure of efficiency, irrespective of whether land is plentiful. The farmers are often considered to be people who would choose to take up other economic occupations were they better educated or more intelligent. I think it is time that opinions such as these were openly challenged and in order to stimulate further controversy and to emphasise that this 'business of farming' is a business, I have given this chapter a somewhat provocative title. In my opinion the migrant cocoa-farmers of Southern Ghana, with whom I am here concerned, were real economic innovators: people who bent their energy and intelligence to the business of cocoafarming with supreme success. But, because of the load of condescension showered on farmers as a class, it did not occur to anyone that this might be so and it is only now, with the aid of the Department of Agriculture's maps, compiled for swollenshoot disease control purposes, that the real account of what happened is being revealed.
