Ghana supports improved, expanded cocoa production

Accra, May 8, GNA - Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and NEPAD, on Monday said Ghana would support every move to increase cocoa production on the Continent while searching for decent world market prices for the commodity.

Briefing journalists on his return from the African Cocoa Summit in Abuja, Nigeria, at the weekend, the Foreign Minister said Ghana also supported moves to ensure that the cocoa market frontiers were expanded and made accessible to a wider spectrum of people especially in India and China.

The Cocoa Summit held at the instance of President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria was to discuss long-term development of the industry and to look at the critical aspects of the cocoa economy with the ultimate goal of ensuring that African cocoa producing countries that collectively accounted for 80 per cent of global cocoa beans had remunerative prices.

Nana Akufo-Addo, who represented President John Agyekum Kufuor, said the objectives of the Summit were threefold.

"It sought to explore long-term measures of the survival of the cocoa industry in Africa, expand domestic processing and consumption of cocoa and cocoa products and increase markets worldwide."

He called on players in the Ghanaian cocoa industry to adopt aggressive promotion efforts to market the produce even in traditional markets while introducing new scientific products from cocoa. The Foreign Minister said Ghana had been provisionally selected to host the next Summit, which "must become an important feature on our national calendar".

He said he was not pleased with the virtual gap between the Cocoa Research Institute's products and industry which had made potential world market products sit idle at the research centres.

"This is the new level that we as a cocoa growing nation must strive to reach and overcome if we are to remain competitive in the industry," Nana Akufo-Addo said.

The Summit was attended by President Fradique de Menes of Sao Tome and Principe; Prime Minister Edem Kojo of Togo; Mr Soni Ebai, Secretary-General of the Cocoa Producers Alliance (COPAL); representatives of the governments of Cote d'Ivoire; Uganda; Cameroon; Ministers of Agriculture and cocoa producing State Governors of Nigeria, members of the public, private sector and academia.

He said the Ghana Cocoa Board was among a large number of exhibitors, who paraded their wares at the Summit. It attracted a large number of participants to the products especially the cocoa powder beverages noted for their high nutritional contents, as well as the cocoa gin and brandy from the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana.

Ghana is the world's second largest cocoa producer with 600,000 tonnes of cocoa while Cote d'Ivoire leads world production with 1.2 million tonnes. Nigeria's production is about 400,000 tonnes.