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Kokoo Pa Farmers Association has chastised Joy News for their ‘Robbing the poor’ documentary.
Joy News reported on the association as being allegedly part of a chain that connives and conspires to sell the “Certificate of Sustainably Certified Cocoa” to make money off the sweat of cocoa farmers.
According to the association, the context in which Kokoo Pa is mentioned in the documentary is “false, malicious and fabricated”.
In a statement copied to GhanaWeb, Kokoo Pa stated that in July 2020, one Abraham Appiah-Kubi of one of the Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) in Ghana invited their Executive Director, Fred Amponsah, to a meeting at a hotel in Kumasi.
At the said meeting, he was introduced to one Hope Wordu of Business Assurance B.V and two other persons purporting to be representatives of a Licensed Buying Company known as Equator.
These persons proposed a certification project to him and indicated that they were in need of a farmer organization like Kokoo Pa to be the training partner in the aforementioned project.
The statement further explained that the meeting focused on how the training services could be carried out in order to get a group of farmers certified.
Prior to the said meeting, Abraham had requested a copy of Kokoo Pa’s certificate to be sent to the group which the Executive Director sent to him in good faith, “having known him for a considerable number of years”.
“It is worthy to note that there is nothing wrong for an organization like Kokoo Pa to share a copy of its certificate with partners and/or prospective partners as it is even a requirement for Certified organizations to display their Certificates openly at their offices. The group further requested a budget from Kokoo Pa during the meeting and in response, Kokoo Pa later submitted an indicative budget to Hope Wordu for onward transmission to the said group which we are now learning was a fictitious Licensed Buying Company, created purposely for this documentary,” the statement read further.
The statement continued: “We suspect that it was at this meeting that our Executive Director was filmed secretly as part of the grand ploy to mischievously connect him and our reputed organization to a chain of activities to suit the objective of the documentary’s storyline.
“We find the action of the Journalist and Multimedia Group unethical, malicious and wicked. We hereby state that the answers provided by our Executive Director were simply a standard industry practice where time, costs and logistics utilized by all cocoa certification training organizations are compensated for in order to get farmers certified.”
Read the full statement below.
