Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Cocoa Board, Joseph Boahen Aidoo has revealed that Ghana recorded more than 1.4 million metric tonnes of cocoa beans production in the 2020/21 crop season.
This represents about 45% increase over the 2019/2020 production and beats the earlier record of about one million metric tonnes achieved in the 2009/2010 crop season.
Aidoo said this shows policies and programmes implemented by government is proving worthwhile.
COCOBOD had implemented the cocoa cultivation under the irrigation system, hand pollination and rehabilitation of age and diseased-infected farms.
“We have exceeded our production target for the year and the money we took as loan didn’t take us anywhere. Very soon, we will sign the syndication for the next crop season and I must say we have made arrangements to get the banks on board to chart this path” he revealed at an event organised by Olam Ghana.
The bumper harvest was far achieved even before the main crop season ended in June.
In actual fact, there were too many cocoa beans produced this year as some of the Licensed Buying Cocoa Companies particularly the smaller players exhausted their seed fund, provided by COCOBOD for purchases of cocoa beans.
The impressive outing had been attributed to favourbale and good policies by the present COCOBOD administration. Some of the policies include “The Living Income Differential” which has raised income of cocoa farmers.
This performance coupled with favourable world market prices will boost exports and the country’s reserves and impact on the cedi.
The nation had earlier forecast 900,000 tonnes of cocoa beans production for this crop season.
Together with Ivory Coast, the two nations control about 70% of the world’s cocoa market.
