Ivory Coast's 2016/17 cocoa season faces a slow start as fewer beans arrived at the country's ports ahead of the new trading period when a new likely higher price takes effect due to a poor mid-crop harvest, buyers said on Tuesday. The season starts on October 1 and output between then and the end of November could stand at around 350,000 tonnes, compared with 546,000 tonnes in the same period last season, they said.
The new price will be announced on Wednesday.
It is not clear how the slow start will impact overall production. Ivory Coast is the world's top cocoa grower and it produced around 1.5 million tonnes in the season ending this week. Output for the new season is expected to stand at 1.6 million tonnes, according to exporters and pod counters. In past years, there has been a significant tonnage of stock ready for export when the new price is announced in October but due to a poor mid-crop period, all of the beans have already been delivered to ports.
"There is no stock waiting for the new season because the mid-crop harvest was bad so nothing was kept back. Everything we bought was delivered immediately to the ports," said Fousseni Konate, a farmer in western Duekou region considered the heart of the cocoa belt.
"The last two or three years we kept back a large volume in September waiting for the raised cocoa price that we delivered in October but this year there's nothing," Konate said, adding he had up to 2,000 tonnes of stock last September compared with nothing now. Buyers in the key growing areas of the south-west and centre-west echoed Konate's sentiments. Cocoa port arrivals stood at 280,000 tonnes last October and 246,000 in November, according to regulator the Cocoa and Coffee Council.
Around 300,000-350,000 tonnes of beans arrived at the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro during the mid-crop, which runs from April to September, industry officials said, as opposed to around 500,000 in the same period last season. At the same time, between 100,000 and 150,000 tons were stockpiled last year in anticipation of the announcement of a guaranteed farmgate price of 900-1,000 CFA francs ($1.71) per 64-kg bag for the 2015/16 season, exporters said. "Normally in October you receive large quantities and a half or more are September stock. Without that, this October's total will fall by half. It's a certainty," said the director of another Abidjan export company.
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