Ivorian cocoa farmers demand state reforms
August 20, 2004
Abidjan - Cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast have accused President Laurent Gbagbo's government of complicity in the shoddy management of the sector, which they say has driven prices down and pushed growers into poverty.
At a meeting this week of agricultural production lobby Ropci, cocoa growers accused the government of doing nothing to halt the slide in revenue from the crop, once a touchstone for the economy of the country, which is the world's top cocoa producer.
"The current management structure has failed consistently at every level," said Ropci president Parfait Tiede.
Growers demanded that a commodities ministry be created in place of the agricultural ministry to better defend their interests.
Ropci's demands followed disturbances in Abidjan last week when the country's cocoa unions threatened to shut down the city should their demands for greater compensation and reform of the sector go unheeded.
The Ivorian cocoa sector was liberalised in 2000 when semiprivate bodies were created to replace the state-run agencies regulating the sector.
A minimum-pricing scheme was abandoned in favour of a sliding tariff scale, the profits from which are paid into a fund to compensate small-scale growers should there be heavy losses on the global markets.
Cocoa producers picketed Abidjan last Thursday, calling for the "dissolution of the [regulating] structures set up to support and guarantee prices, but which are not fulfilling their roles".
This had followed last month's calls by another group of cocoa growers for reforms to the Regulation and Control Fund, which is supposed to compensate cocoa growers for financial losses resulting from falling world prices.
They had called for the body's reserve fund, estimated to be worth more than 200 billion CFA francs (R2.4 billion), to be made available to them.
About 6 million of the Ivorian population of 17 million rely on cocoa, which, together with coffee, brings in 40 percent of national export revenues and 10 percent of gross domestic product.
World cocoa prices have fluctuated wildly in the past two years, due to the political and military crisis in Ivory Coast, and unfavourable weather conditions.
Collectively the planters and growers' unions said they had been cheated out of $80 million (R520 million).
The EU, which has withheld badly needed aid from Ivory Coast in the absence of concrete political reforms, stated earlier this month that the rule of law had been "compromised by the obstacles the Ivorian government has put in the path of [an] EU-financed audit of the cocoa sector".
|
|
