Buoyem is a historic cocoa town in the Techiman North District of the Bono East Region — one of the earliest centres of cocoa cultivation in Ghana and, for well over a century, a thriving agricultural community whose name is bound up with the story of how cocoa came to these shores. The town sits in the Techiman traditional area, a crossroads of Akan culture where the Bono, Asante and Fante strands of our history meet. Buoyem's fame rests on two pillars: cocoa and education. It is widely remembered as one of the first places in the then-Brong Ahafo (now Bono East) where cocoa was successfully cultivated on a large scale, and the town grew prosperous on the crop — cocoa farms, buying stations, and the seasonal rhythm of the harvest shaped daily life there. Alongside the cocoa, Buoyem is known for its agricultural college, the Buoyem Agricultural College, which has trained generations of Ghanaian farmers, extension officers and agriculturists. That combination — a cocoa town that also teaches agriculture — makes it a fitting symbol of Ghana's cocoa story. Cocoa itself arrived in Ghana through the Eastern Region — Tetteh Quarshie's farm at Mampong-Akuapem in the 1870s, with the crop spreading through the forest belt under Governor Sir William Brandford Griffith's encouragement in the 1880s and 1890s. Farmers carried it westward into Ashanti and Brong Ahafo, and Buoyem was among the communities where the crop took deep root. By the early twentieth century, Ghana had become the world's leading cocoa producer, and towns like Buoyem were the engine of that rise. The cocoa economy built roads, schools, churches and cocoa sheds across the region, and Buoyem's growth reflects that. Today Buoyem remains an agricultural community — cocoa still matters, but farmers there also grow maize, cassava, plantain, yam and cashew, and the town serves as a market and service centre for surrounding villages. Its proximity to Techiman, one of West Africa's largest market towns, keeps it plugged into regional trade. On the current policy front, the government's cocoa sector reforms — as the COCOBOD CEO reiterated this week — are aimed at revitalising the sector, improving farmers' livelihoods, strengthening financial sustainability and boosting value addition. For a town like Buoyem, whose identity is cocoa, those reforms matter directly: better farmgate prices, improved seedlings, and local processing all translate into real money in the pockets of farming families. *A proverb for it: "Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a, yenkyi" — Sankofa. Buoyem's cocoa heritage is not just nostalgia; it is a foundation to build on, and the reforms now underway are a way of going back to fetch what was good and carrying it forward.*