Ghana's cocoa light crop starts slow, 10% down

Ghana's 2007/08 cocoa light crop got off to a slow start with less than 5,000 tonnes of beans purchased in its first week, 10 percent down on purchases in the same period last year, an industry source said on Tuesday.

Many farmers in the world's No. 2 cocoa grower had already sold their first light crop beans as part of the preceding main crop, the source said.

Smuggling of Ghanaian beans to neighbouring states, especially Ivory Coast, may also have hit the light crop that started on June 27 in the second part of Ghana's two-cycle cocoa season, other officials in the sector said.

Private buyers declared 4,646 tonnes for the first light crop week ending July 3, down by 10 percent over last year's 5,169 tonnes.

"The low figures at this stage of the light crop are not unusual," the industry source said.

"Farmers have the tendency of adding a chunk of their maiden (light crop) harvest to their last main crop deliveries in order to win more bonuses," the source said.

Ghana's government pays bonuses to the country's farmers on declared main crop purchases twice every year as part of an incentive package to boost production.

Industry regulator Cocobod has forecast that this year's light crop will yield at least 50,000 tonnes, nearly twice as much as last year's 27,000 tonnes.

The industry source was confident that declared purchases would pick up as the season progressed. "It's not as if there was a poor harvest. No, the season has been good so far because we've had good rains," he told Reuters.

Last week, another industry official told Reuters this year's light crop was being threatened by smuggling along the western border with Ivory Coast.

The official said it was too early to say exactly how much cocoa had been smuggled since the light crop began but added that plain clothes police officers had been deployed to targeted areas to crack down on the trafficking.

Ghana has faced this smuggling problem since the start of this year. This forced the government to raise its farmgate price for cocoa by more than 25 percent at the end of February. Another industry source told Reuters on Tuesday that authorities were tackling the smuggling: "There has been a swift response from the government and Cocobod and we expect that the (smuggling) activity will reduce significantly in coming weeks."

Ghana's main crop harvest, which closed June 5, reached 663,558 tonnes, up by 12.9 percent year-on-year.

Ghana has set itself an ambitious target to harvest at least one million tonnes of cocoa a year by 2010, mainly through increased use of fertiliser and adoption of high yielding seeds, combined with improved farming methods.