Ivory Coast sees cocoa woes despite record crop

Ivory Coast cocoa exports will suffer due to storage damage, despite a bumper crop from the world's biggest producer, economy and finance minister Paul Bohoun Bouabre told Reuters on Wednesday. Production for the West African nation's 2004/05 (October-September) season is estimated at around 1,350,000 tonnes, he said.
But the amount of exportable cocoa was likely to be less than this because some had been damaged while stored for long periods during a farmers' strike in late October and during days of rioting early last month.
"We risk losing at least 100,000 tonnes because of the problems this season," he said in an interview.
"I'm not satisfied with the way the season has been going ... We can expect a drop in the exportable production. The fact that the season began late meant some of the cocoa rotted and so a certain volume will be registered as lost," he said.
Officials at the Coffee and Cocoa Bourse said on Tuesday Ivory Coast produced a record cocoa harvest of more than 1.5 million tonnes in 2003/04 if some 150,000 tonnes of cocoa smuggled abroad was taken into account.
Bouabre said smuggling, which he estimated to have reached at least 200,000 tonnes in 2003/04, had been the main problem over the past season.
The current harvest has had a slow start because of a dispute on farmgate prices, which triggered a producers' strike in October, followed by days of mob violence which paralysed the main port Abidjan a month later.
However Bouabre said cocoa deliveries at ports should pick up in the period between January and March 2005.
A source at a European-based exporter said the firm's pod counters estimated Ivory Coast's main crop - which usually runs from October to March - to total between 1,050,000 and 1,070,000 tonnes at the end of April. The mid-crop comes in on average at about 200,000 tonnes, although it has been closer to 300,000 tonnes in the past two seasons.
Bouabre reiterated that he had no plans to lower the main cocoa tax on exports, or DUS, which exporters say is too high.
"I have no reason to change it," he said.
Bouabre said Ivory Coast's economic growth would be close to zero this year, but should not be negative even if the country remains split in two by a civil war that broke out in 2002.