As Liberia recovers from a ruinous civil war, tropical agriculture experts plan to revive cocoa farming there by educating growers and helping them plant thousands of high-yielding, disease-resistant hybrid trees.
Liberia is a tiny producer, its crop of under 5,000 tonnes of cocoa beans a year dwarfed by the 1.35 million tonnes regularly harvested in neighbouring top producer Ivory Coast.
"I definitely expect an increase in production," said Mac Pay-Bayer, country manager for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture's Sustainable Tree Crop Programme. Largely US State aid donor USAID and the chocolate industry's World Cocoa Foundation fund the programme.
"The quantities we will produce here in Liberia will not have any impact on the international market price, but we hope for farmers to be able to make a fairly good living from cocoa," Pay-Bayed, who studied agricultural economics at Louisiana State University, told Reuters from Monrovia in a telephone interview.
The programme has been running in Liberia since 2005 and started field work a year later, educating farmers in plant husbandry and helping them rehabilitate old cocoa trees neglected during 14 years of on-off civil war that ended when ex-warlord President Charles Taylor went into exile in 2003.
"Throughout the war there was no new planting, but the old trees were harvested, sometimes not by the owner. Therefore there was no actual care for the trees.
It is only now we are trying to encourage farmers to plant new crops," Pay-Bayer said. Last year, the programme trained 349 farmers and in October it plans to bring in hybrid cocoa seeds from Ivory Coast to cultivate and gradually replace old trees. "These are high-yielding varieties, highly disease resistant, and early maturing varieties. These varieties, if you follow the recommended cultural practices you begin harvesting after three years instead of the regular five years," he said.
Pay-Bayed said each farmer would be encouraged to plant at least a hectare of cocoa in existing growing areas, with each hectare accounting for around 1,000 trees. "Right now farmers are getting as low as 150 kg per hectare (yield), but we believe that with this practice we can get as high as 800 kg per hectare," he said.
"Production is still relatively low the estimate we have is no more than 5,000 metric tonnes a year," Pay-Bayer said. UN Food and Agriculture Organisation data put 2006 output at 3,000 tonnes up from less than 500 tonnes at the 1990s height of the war but precise figures are hard to find as much of the cocoa is shipped out of neighbouring Guinea.
"Most of what has been produced, especially last year, went through Guinea. The market here was not responding enough to farmer's demands, so a lot of it went through Guinea. Even cocoa from the Ivory Coast has been going to Guinea," he said.
"Part of the problem is road transport is difficult here, so when someone comes to your doorstep and offers you a price, which will avoid the problem of finding transport, a lot of farmers take advantage of it," he said.
Liberia's cocoa farmers are due to get help marketing their beans and forming sales co-operatives to improve their commercial operations under a related programme funded by the US and Canadian governments and the US-based World Cocoa Foundation.