Em.'s In & Outs

Everybody knows shea from being the favorite commodity at the centre of the Body Shop's socially counscious discourse. I was reading about the shea global market and realized there was much more to it than, one the one end, the domestic use by families in West-Africa (oil, butter, soap) and, on the other end, the ''exotic'' cosmetics used by cosmopolitan Western consumers.

It occurs than most of the time it is written something like vegetable oil on the back of a mass-produced chocolate bar, it most likely refers to shea oil! How strange?

Another thing I notice is that shea is a trade that empowers and bound women together. It takes the strenght of the youth, the capital of the middle-aged and the experience of the elderly to produce shea butter, which is a tremendously labor-intensive activity. Women in Ghana are said to keep the income from the sales of shea butter to themselves, and young women learning how to set up their own shea business become more independent on their husbands later in life, which in turn, by increasing their ''bargaining power'', might have the effect of their vulnerability to domestic violence. In addition, many women of the same neighbourhood contribute to each other's efforts in a rotating basis, which garantees a supply of labor and thus diminishes the need for taking loans and hiring employees. Neat, hey?