Official: Price support reviving cocoa interest

The National Business

By GLORIA BAUAI
THE Government’s price support intervention into the cocoa industry has revived interest in the commodity, says an official.
Cocoa Board chief executive officer Boto Gaupu said the commodity board had been allocated a K10 million from the K50 million set aside for agriculture intervention programmes.
Since last December, the cocoa board has been launching price support schemes into cocoa growing provinces and has seen a positive response.
“From what we’re seeing, farmers are not waiting for our officers to go conduct training and extension services,” Gaupu said.
“They’re taking the initiative to clean their blocks, do rehabilitation and management.”
Jack Akike from the Department of Agriculture and Livestock said the scheme was to subsidise the price of the buyer at the village level.
“If the commodity is going for K2 per kilogramme, the government adds K1 and increases the wet bean value to K3,” Akike explained.
“This should motivate farmers to increase their volume of production, which will then increase the volume sold to the exporters and increase the return from this commodity.”
Morobe recently came on board with the programme but its cocoa farmers expressed interest before the launch on Monday.

One thought on “Official: Price support reviving cocoa interest”

  • The issue with this price support program for cocoa are limited coverage and the sustainability of it in terms of funding. It is a big challenge in terms of its coverage as not all farmers will benefit from it only few and selected farmers, also the issue of sustainability in terms funding from the government especially delay in releasing of funds to support the program. Another issue is the timing of the price support, it would be good if it only comes in when prices are very low not in times when prices are high. Furthermore, a good amount of this price support money will be absorbed by administrative cost. In terms of its impact on production, I believe it would not have an immediate impact as there are other big hindrance to production of cocoa by farmers like cocoa pod borer, deteriorating infrastructures like roads increasing freight cost so there is not much incentive there for production. Farmers have to still travel to reach buying points for wet beans and so impact of production in fact would be for the zero. Only if roads and the key impediments to production are address this price support would have no impact on production.

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