Editorial by Ghanaian Times: Don’t relent in effort to locally fund cocoa purchases!
Published:
3 months ago
Source:
GhanaWeb
After 32 years of contracting a syndicated loan annually to purchase cocoa from farmers in the country, the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) says that beginning in 2024/2025, it will finance the purchase of cocoa beans and its operations domestically. Over the past three decades, COCOBOD has been securing a syndicated loan each year, usually around August or September. Going for syndicated loans to buy cocoa from the farmers at a fixed price and protect them from changes in global prices meant that COCOBOD needed amounts too large to attract the willingness of a single entity to lend to a single borrower. What that implied was that COCOBOD didn't have enough of its own funds to undertake that operation. Some of us had been worrying about the COCOBOD's annual cap-in-hand exercise, wondering why that should be so for an agency of a country that was the world's leading producer of cocoa between 1911 and 1976, contributing between 30-40 of the global total output, but now second with cocoa still contributing a chunk part of the country's foreign exchange earnings.