Cocoa production: African countries endorsed sustainable growing project

Cocoa farmers in Africa have been encouraged to contemplate the future of their produce with hope certainty. The encouragement came on the hills of the signing of a plan of action by 14 West and Central African cocoa producing countries to ensure sustainable cocoa growing over the next 3 decades.
By Mbome Fritz

The plan intends to help farmers considerably increase their harvests and incomes through the cultivation of better-yielding crops with beefed up resistance to pests and droughts and which also consume fewer natural resources.
It should be noted here that the said project was approved at a recent conference that held in Ghana, grouping some 250 agriculture; finance and trade ministers; scientists; farmers; cocoa dealers and donor organisations.
The said conference sponsored by inter alia, the government of Ghana, the cocoa producer’s alliance, COPAL, and the government of Cameroon was the first of its kind for the continent of Africa that counts over two million cocoa farmers who grow 70 percent of the world’s cocoa supplies.
Mars Inc. forum initiators which conduct research on ways to improve cocoa farming techniques for better yields said the endorsement of the plan was a significant leap in boosting farmers’ incomes and curbing poverty. The plan, according to Ghana’s President, John Kufour, will among others translate into the adaptation of scientific findings by farmers; create avenues for the propagation of scientific information; technologies and funding as well as enable rapid market information flow to farmers.
Governments are expected to lead efforts towards the implementation of the consensus program by intervening to boost farmers’ earnings through disbursing incentives especially within the context of an increasingly challenging global economic environment. At the end of the conference Participants called for more public-private sector collaboration as a major pre-condition for the success of the plan.