ABSTRACT
The most important of the compromises was the 'strategic alliance' which the Ghanaian Fourth Republic formed from the mid-1980s onward with cocoa producers, which enabled urban bias to be replaced with proper incentives to rural exporters and a threadbare fiscal system to evolve into one of the more imaginative tax and social protection systems in Africa. Although the commercial gold mining company in Ghana, Ashanti Gold Fields, was established in 1897 and deposits of precious metals were worked well before that, mineral production was overshadowed by production of agricultural export staples, in particular cocoa, throughout the colonial period, and indeed, for several decades after that. Thus, Ghana has over thirty years transformed itself from a fragile into a fingers crossed fiscally secure state, a process which has, however, just been threatened by a series of violent shocks. In Ghana, by contrast, small-scale miners are scarcely unionised at all, and feel themselves unrecognised by state and, indeed, subject to ethnic discrimination.
