The Ghana COCOBOD has rejected claims that Ghana has now resorted to importing Cocoa beans from Cote d`Ivoire to feed local factories.
According to COCOBOD, it rather granted permission to a private company that imported smaller and cheaper cocoa beans from Cote d`Ivoire to augment their purchase in Ghana.
Finance minister Seth Terpker early this week told parliament, COCOBOD in the 2014/15 crop season imported some 15,500 tonnes of cocoa beans from neighbouring Ivory Coast to make for a short fall.
But in an interview with Citi Business News, Public Affairs Manager of COCOBOD, Noah Amenyah denied the reports.
“COCOBOD has not imported cocoa beans into Ghana; COCOBOD is rather exporting cocoa out of Ghana. What the minister was explaining is that there is a private company that had imported 15,000 tonnes of smaller cocoa beans into Ghana to blend with what they had purchased from Ghana which are bigger beans in size after they had bought the smaller beans from Ghana over 40,000 tonnes but they wanted this smaller beans from Cote d`Ivoire to blend what they have so they sought permission to buy which was granted.” He said.
Noah Amenyah further explained that Ghana’s production of 850,000 metric tonnes is in excess of the 50,000 metric tonnes demanded by the company. He added there are some other 10 processing companies which buy these smaller beans from our neighbor Cote d`Ivoire.
source: citifmonline