Economy
Cocoa is an important part of the economy, including plantations and casual plantings along roadsides. The crop is dried and stored in warehouses for shipment. There are several small palm oil farms to the north of the Birim river, covering about 6,000 hectares. Byproducts from the palm-oil mills are used in soap-making. Bamboo is another useful and fast-growing crop, a strong and inexpensive material used for furniture and construction. The banks of the Birim river are rich in both gold and diamonds, extracted locally through artisanal processes.
The forests contain valuable trees, and there is some illegal lumbering. Ghana's forest area dropped from 8.2 million hectares around 1900 to 1.6 million hectares by 2000, and continues to decline rapidly due to demand both for exports and for construction by the growing population. Managed plantations are being introduced near Akim Oda and may help to reverse the decline.
Read more about this topic: Akim Oda
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)