Police, Immigration & Customs implicated in cocoa smuggling

Security agencies at the various entry points at the Ghana-Ivory Coast border, in league with some licensed buying companies, are smuggling truck loads of inferior quality cocoa beans into Ghana, investigations by The Globe newspaper revealed.

The Police, Immigration and Customs officers at the border are bribed with GHc 2 per bag of inferior quality beans smuggled into the country.

The Globe newspaper’s sorties revealed that the smuggling has been going on for the past two months since the 2011/2012 season started.

The tacit-acquiescence of the various buying companies and the security agencies to the smuggling is a source of worry to some personnel within the Customs division of the Ghana Revenue Authority but are unable to blow whistle for fear of victimization.

Ghana’s Cocoa Production increased from about 680,000 metric tonnes in the 2007/2008 season to over one million metric tonnes in 2010/2011 season. It was the highest increase ever.

The government put the phenomenal leap down to state interventions such as the supply of high yielding plants, supply of inputs for rehabilitating old farms and timely payments of producer prices and bonuses.

Reliable information reaching The Globe however revealed that intense smuggling activity at the border accounted for the boost in production.

The LBCs allegedly compromised the quality of Ghana’s cocoa beans with the tonnes of smuggled beans from the already porous border - a situation which The Globe newspaper learnt was worsened with the institutionalised bribery and corruption at the entry points.

According to our sources at the border and within the various security units responsible for controlling the illegal transport of cocoa from Ivory Coast, at least two thousand bags of cocoa are smuggled into Ghana daily.

For the 2011/2012 cocoa production season, The Globe newspaper learnt the smuggling has been going on for a few months now, an act that sources said got the President of Ivory Coast Alassane Ouatarra so infuriated to the extent that he dispatched his Agriculture Minister to the entry points at the border to ascertain the trend and also warn the Ghanaian security agencies to immediately halt the smuggling.

Sources of The Globe, however, said President Ouatarra’s appeal appears to have had negligible impact on the situation so far since the smuggling persists.

Currently Ghana is ranked the second largest producer of Cocoa in the world and with the breakdown in the Ivorian economy, there are indications some individuals in Ghana are making efforts to get Ghana to overtake Ivory Coast as the leading producer but through illegal means.

The Globe newspaper’s sources indicate that huge trucks continue to cross the border to and from Ivory Coast fully loaded with several thousand bags of suspected smuggled cocoa beans.

There are several implications for Ghana if the ongoing institutionalized smuggling continues.

Ghana risks losing its credibility as the producer of the best cocoa beans in the world as the buying companies are mixing the smuggled inferior cocoa beans from Ivory Coast with the ones from Ghana.

Meanwhile, the Public Relations Officer of COCOBOD, Noah Amenya in an interview with Citi News expressed worry about the report and indicated that investigations will be launched into report.