Maru wants use of firewood fuel fermenting to stop

MINISTER for National Planning and Monitoring Richard Maru has told the Cocoa Board of PNG to ensure the use of wood fired cocoa driers was eventually stopped.
He made the remarks during the recently concluded “Cocoa of Excellence” show in Lae, Morobe.
Maru said cocoa beans produced using this method were of poor quality and that had downgraded the commodity on the international market.
He challenged the board to develop a better and more efficient method of fermenting cocoa beans that farmers could apply to produce quality beans to meet international market standards.
Apart from the firewood fuel cocoa dryer, solar or sun-drying of cocoa beans is another method that farmers used.
He said this method had produced better quality of dried beans, however, due to the fewer number of sunlight hours in most cocoa producing provinces in the country, drying was unpredictable. Meanwhile, a local biogas engineer has developed a multi-purpose biogas dryer (fermentry).
Thompson Benguma, when developing the multi-purpose dryer said the flaws and shortcomings in the other drying methods had prompted him to research other means to achieve good results.
“This results in the design of a more innovative and efficient method of drying agricultural cash crop commodities such as cocoa, coffee, vanilla and others,” he said. Bengum said the multi-purpose biogas dryer came as part of the domestic biogas septic system which produced biogas.
He said human and organic food waste from a family of five flushed into the septic system produced biogas by a process known as anaerobic digestion.
He said the system was efficient for farmers to use when it came to fermenting cocoa, coffee and vanilla beans.