By Maxwell Akalaare Adombila and Christian Akorlie
ACCRA (Reuters) – Ghana, the world’s number two cocoa producer, has raised the fixed farmgate price paid to cocoa farmers for the second time this 2024/25 season to help boost farmers’ incomes, President Nana Akufo-Addo said.
Akufo-Addo, whose two-term mandate ends on Jan. 7, 2025, said at a farmers’ award ceremony late on Friday that cocoa farmers would now receive 49,600 Ghanaian cedi ($3,062) per metric ton compared with the 48,000 Ghanaian cedi announced when the season opened on Sept. 1.
A cocoa marketing board (Cocobod) spokesperson said the increase had been introduced with immediate effect.
Reports of a possible price hike led to farmers’ hoarding beans in October, potentially squeezing global supplies.
The authorities have been seeking to increase farmers’ incomes and deter smuggling, which led to Ghana losing more than a third of its cocoa output for 2023/24, according to Cocobod officials. This compounded sectoral woes that brought Ghana’s production to a more than two-decade low, helping send global cocoa prices to record highs.
Akufo-Addo also said he had directed Cocobod to provide scholarships to cocoa farmers’ children in tertiary education.
However Bright Simons, a vice president at Accra-based think tank IMANI Africa, said the motivation for the policies “appears to be strictly about votes in the impending elections”, noting that the price hike was significantly below the cumulative effects of inflation and currency depreciation, muting the potential impact.
Ghana, one of Africa’s most stable democracies, heads to the polls on Dec. 7 to elect a replacement to Akufo-Addo, who first came to office in 2017.
Vice President Muhamudu Bawumia of the ruling New Patriotic Party, and former president John Mahama of the main opposition National Democratic Congress party, are the main contenders.
Polls from Accra-based research group Global InfoAnalytics tip Mahama to win as Ghana’s worst economic crisis in a generation weighs against the ruling party. Bawumia, an economist and former central banker, is seen as the face of the government’s economic policies.
Ghana’s cocoa production is second only to neighbouring Ivory Coast.
($1 = 16.2000 Ghanaian cedi)
(Editing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by David Holmes)
