Shea: The better butter

Shea butter, extracted from shea nuts, is used in the food and cosmetics industries
Photographs: Jessica Sarkodie for The Body Shop

It is winter in Mbanayili. The temperature is nudging 37 degrees Celsius, as the sun beats down on the dusty, red earth of this village in northern Ghana. It is late morning when the women gather in the shade of two giant kapok trees, soon filling the air with their lilting voices and clapping. They sway and twirl, in circles and with each other, singing, “Let the light in”.

Taking time out for singing and dancing is not something they can do often. After tending to their husbands’ farms, their children and attending to household chores, there isn’t time for much else. In this rigid patriarchal society where, traditionally, women have barely had a say in any matter and have endured abuses in many forms, the voices of these women now ring louder than they have before.

Thanks to the humble shea.

The shea tree, indigenous to western Africa, grows naturally, unlike plantation crops grown in humid high forest zones, like palm oil, rubber and cocoa. The fact that shea trees take between 15 and 20 years to grow fully, and bear fruit, makes them financially difficult to farm. The fruit of the tree—comprising a thin tart pulp, and a large oil-rich seed—has been traditionally gathered by rural women to make shea butter, which they sell in local markets, and use themselves, either as a cooking medium or to moisturise their dry skin against the heat and dryness of sub-Saharan Africa. The meagre earnings from its sale supplement the earnings from farming, which sees only one harvest a year in the tropical country.

“Income from shea is modest by comparison with palm oil, but its significance for livelihood security is enormous,” says a November 2018 report by AAK, formerly AarhusKarlshamn, a Swedish-Danish company and producer of value-adding vegetable oils and fats. “Generally, this income passes through the hands of women to support expenditure on household essentials. It fills a critical income-gap at the start of the rainy season, when food stocks from the previous annual harvest are low and the current season’s crops are yet to yield.”

According to the Global Shea Alliance (GSA), in the last 20 years, the shea export market from African countries has grown by 600 percent, to 350,000 metric tonnes a year, creating approximately $200 million in annual income and employing more than 4 million women. While 90 percent of the shea produced in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso is consumed by the food industry (confectionaries, more specifically), the remaining is used by the cosmetics industry.

Conventionally, confectionaries that were categorised as chocolate used cocoa butter. However, a rising global demand for chocolates has meant that the price of cocoa butter has kept rising, pushing confectioners to look for cheaper substitutes. Cocoa butter equivalents (CBEs)—these include shea butter, palm and other vegetable oils—are estimated to cost 30 to 40 percent less than cocoa butter, according to CBI, the Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries, which works with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.

Shea butter is not only a cheaper alternative, but like cocoa butter melts at body temperature enabling confectioners to make chocolates of varying textures and consistencies. In 2000, the European Union allowed confectioners to use cocoa butter alternatives in chocolates, but restricted the use of these alternatives to a maximum of 5 percent of the chocolate product. Shea is one of the six alternatives currently allowed as an ingredient in these non-cocoa butter fats. The GSA says CBEs report a yearly growth of 10 percent (based on 2010 figures; the market has slowed down following the impact of the economic crisis).