Prolonged heavy rains in Ivory Coast's south-eastern cocoa-growing region have dampened hopes for a good main crop there, causing many developing pods on trees to rot, farmers and buyers said at the weekend.
The Aboisso area, which lies on a main road from Ivory Coast to Ghana, usually produces 80,000-100,000 tonnes of beans per year, the National Agency for Rural Development (ANADER) says. This is only a small share of the average 1.3 million tonne Ivorian cocoa harvest. Local growers said production in the south-east had been disappointingly small this year.
Although rains are easing as the West African country enters a seasonal hot, dry spell, farmers say heavy downpours from June onwards during the early, formative stages of the (October-March) cocoa main crop damaged many small pods. "The season isn't so good this year. There isn't so much cocoa because there was just too much rain," said Koua Dja, chairman of the Betianou co-operative in Mafere near Aboisso.
"When there's too much rain, the cherelles (small pods) rot on the branches and there's black rot (disease) which is also due to the humidity," he said as workers unloaded three tonnes of cocoa from a pick-up parked at the warehouse entrance.
Cultivation of cocoa in Ivory Coast, now the world's top producer, first began in this eastern side of the country after spreading from Ghana, now the No 2 producer. But the bulk of the Ivorian crop is now produced in the west and south-west. The Aboisso region also produces thousands of tonnes of coffee, bananas, pineapple, palm oil and rubber and humidity from the dense broad-leaved vegetation contributes to the creation of heavy rains which fall there.
ROTTEN PODS About 5 km (3 miles) from Mafere, grower Boukari Bissiri's trees looked in a pitiful state. Among a small number of developing green and ripened yellow pods hanging from the branches were many, which had shrivelled and turned black or ashen.
"We had good production last year but not now. There was too much rain this year and not enough sun in between," he said, speaking in the regional Agni dialect through an interpreter. "There are a lot of rotten pods this year. I sprayed the trees (with pesticides) last year but not this year. I do it when I have the means," said Bassiri, who has six hectares of cocoa fields and a further six planted with coffee.
While growers say rains were excessive for this main crop, they hoped the good moisture levels in the soil would pave the way for an abundant (April-September) mid crop - the smaller of the two annual six-month growing cycles. "We think we should get a good mid-crop after all the rain we've had," said Bernard Kassi, cashier at Mafere's Entente Co-operative.
Temperatures are noticeably hotter now in Ivory Coast as the dry season starts to follow on from the rainy season which runs roughly from April to November, and buyers said that would help ensure beans that they were buying had been properly dried.
Co-operatives said increased smuggling of beans to Ghana was a further blow to trade this season, slashing the volumes they handled. Anader'e head in Aboisso, Kouadio Dongo, estimated at least 30,000 tonnes of the zone's beans were smuggled to Ghana. Kassi said some police and customs officials close to the frontier with Ghana took bribes to allow the cocoa through.
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