By Patrick Biddah
The Ghana Civil Society Cocoa Platform, has lamented the spate of increasing challenges facing farmers and the cocoa sector.
The platform, with a membership of about 10,000, has expressed its worry about these challenges facing the cocoa industry and wants urgent action by government to forestall it further decline.
Some of these challenges, they pointed out are fast bringing the cocoa sector to its knees than expected.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday September 2, 2024, the President for Mankrong Cocoa Farmers Society, Mr Francis Teinor, who spoke on behalf of the group, indicated that delays in the disbursement of the cocoa syndicated loans to most of the Licensed Produce Buying Companies ( LPCs) contributed to their inability to raise capital to purchase cocoa.
Some of these developments, , Mr Teinor pointed out forces some of the farmers to smuggle cocoa to neighbouring countries in search of better prices which often times leads to low volumes of cocoa beans at the country’s ports.
According to Mr Teinor, government realised the effects of these happenings and decided to review the farm-gate prices in the middle of the season 2023/2024 season.
This intervention by government, according to the Civil Society Platform, was too-little too-late, but has also alerted the government to avert this from being repeated in the 2024 / 2025 season by announcing a favourable high price for famers.
“ As the 2025 cocoa season approaches, expectations are particularly high with the announcement of new farm-gate prices for September “, Mr Teinor revealed.
Mr Teinor minced no words when he tagged their new farm-gate price expectation to fall between 65-70 percentage increase.
“We expect that the farm-gate prices should be set at a minimum of $3,662.60 per tonne , depending on the exchange rate applied, the minimum farm-gate price per tonne of cocoa beans should be GH¢57, 320 ( using an exchange $1 :GH¢15.65) which should translate to minimum GH¢, 583 per bag ( 64kg) of cocoa beans”, he stressed.
