Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s top producer, have accused President Laurent Gbagbo’s government of complicity in the shoddy management of the sector, which they say has driven prices down and forced growers into poverty.
At a meeting on Wednesday at the headquarters of Côte d’Ivoire’s agricultural production lobby ROPCI, cocoa growers complained of the growing impoverishment and accused the government of doing nothing to halt the slide in revenues from the crop, once a touchstone for the Ivorian economy that was for decades envied across the region.
”The current management structure has failed consistently at every level,” said ROPCI president Parfait Tiede.
The growers demanded that a commodities ministry be created to replace the agricultural ministry and better defend their interests.
Wednesday’s demands followed disturbances in the economic hub Abidjan last week by the country’s cocoa unions, who threatened to shut down the city should their demands for greater compensation and reform of the sector go unheeded.
Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa sector was liberalised in 2000 with the creation of semi-private bodies that replaced 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 demonstrated in Abidjan last Thursday, calling for the ”dissolution of these [regulating] structures, set up to support and guarantee prices, but which are not fulfilling their roles”.
Last month, another group of cocoa growers called for reforms to one of the bodies, the cocoa Regulation and Control Fund (FRC), which is supposed to compensate growers for financial loss resulting from falling world prices.
They called for reforms to the FRC’s statutes, to allow growers to derive more benefit from regulating bodies, ”notably by making available to them the reserve fund estimated at more than 200-billion CFA francs (300-million euros).
About six million of Côte d’Ivoire’s 17-million population rely either directly or indirectly on cocoa, which along with coffee represents 40% of the country’s export revenues and 10% of GDP.
World cocoa prices have fluctuated wildly in the past two years, due to the political and military crisis in Côte d’Ivoire sparked by a failed bid to oust Gbagbo in September 2002, and to weather conditions unfavourable to the crop.
Collectively, the planters and growers unions say they have been cheated out of about $80-million, and have sought additional millions in compensation for hardships endured during the civil war spawned by the abortive 2002 coup that still divides the country.
The European Union, which has withheld badly needed aid money from Côte d’Ivoire in the absence of concrete political reforms over the last two years, earlier this month proposed holding crisis talks with the Gbagbo government.
The EU’s executive arm also stated that the rule of law in Côte d’Ivoire has been ”compromised by the obstacles the Ivorian government has put in the path of [an] EU-financed audit of the cocoa sector”.
The EU offer followed a pact signed in late July by all parties to the Ivorian conflict, which mandated political reform and set a timeline for disarmament, in line with a French-brokered peace pact signed in January last year to end the civil war sparked in September 2002.
”The president of Cote d’Ivoire and all the leaders of Cote d’Ivoire agreed to go back and resume the national government of reconciliation… to put the management of their nation back on track for free and fair elections come next year,” said Ghanaian President John Kufuor, who hosted the talks leading up to the pact. – Sapa-AFP