The price of cocoa beans in Nigeria, the country’s second-largest export earner after oil, jumped 21 percent in three weeks, on fears that flooding that ravaged farms could cut output, forcing the industry to lower its output forecast for the year, officials, farmers and traders say.
Price per metric ton rose to N700,000 ($2,282.36) from N580,000, as buyers scrambled for the beans, as the industry organisation said output for the year could fall by as much as seven percent on poor weather conditions.
“The high incident of this year’s rainfall has cut down our 2017-2018 production by seven percent,” Sayina Rima, national president, Cocoa Association of Nigeria (CAN) said by phone from his farm in Ikom, in the South-South region.
Nigeria currently ranks joint fifth with neighbouring Cameroon with 210, 000 metric tons production in the 2016-2017 season, according to data from the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO). The international organisation estimated Nigeria’s production to reach 240,000 metric tons in the 2017-2018 output.
However, CAN fears that a decline in cocoa output could lead to a drop in the country’s position among the leading cocoa producing countries.
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Rima said that high humidity led to the outbreak of Black Pod, a fungus diseasediseases, this year and that the flood has made it difficult for farmers to sun-dry their cocoa beans properly.
“The combination of these factors has led to a decline in our production when compared to that of last season,” Rima explained.
These developments have led the surge in prices as exporters find it difficult to get enough quantity for export, Rima added.
Farmers do not have adequate sunlight to dry their beans and this has resulted in the scarcity, Zacheaus Egbewusi, chief executive officer of Lagos-based Agri-commodity Inspection Limited, told BusinessDay by phone.
Egbewusi said that farmers are unable to maintain the quality of their cocoa beans, as machine-drying , which is not easily available in most rural areas, reduces the flavour of the beans.
Ademola Akinmulure, a cocoa farmer in Omioliyan village in western Ondo State, says he is yet to produce a third of the quantity he had by this time a year ago.
“By this time last year, I had produced three tons of beans for sale, but this year’s main crop I am yet to even get a ton of dried cocoa beans,’’ he said by phone. “My cocoa pods got spoilt on the farm because I could not harvest it on time. I did not make anything from this year cocoa farming,” Akinmulure added.
Nigeria has two cocoa harvests which include the smaller midcrop from April to June, and the main crop from October to December. The main crop, which produces bigger bean seeds, normally accounts for about 70 percent of Nigeria’s cocoa output while the midcrop accounts for the remaining percentage.
At the international market, a metric ton of cocoa was sold at $2,186 as at the time of writing.
Josephine Okojie
