Cocobod insists it is confident of meeting its Cocoa production target of 800,000 tonnes this season despite harsh weather conditions at the crop season’s start.

Reuters is reporting that Ghana’s graded and sealed (G&S) cocoa arrivals since the start of this year’s harvest on October 1 had reached 408,000 tonnes by February 3, down 42 per cent from the same period of the previous season.

Meanwhile, Head of Corporate Affairs at COCOBOD, Fifi Boafo, tells Joy Business, innovative alternatives are being employed to offset the impact on production.

“We acknowledge the impact of the harsh weather conditions but Cocobod is resolute in meeting our targets regardless,” he stated.

Ghana recorded more than 1.4 million metric tonnes of cocoa beans production in the 2020/21 crop season.

This is about a 45 per cent increase over 2019/2020 production and beats the earlier record of about one million metric tonnes achieved in the 2009/2010 crop season.

Joy Business had earlier reported that Ghana may surpass the anticipated 1.1 million tonnes of cocoa production for the 2020/2021 crop season which closes next month.

The bumper harvest Joy Business gathered was far achieved even before the main crop season ended in June.

In actual fact, there were too many cocoa beans produced this year as some of the Licensed Buying Cocoa Companies particularly the smaller players exhausted their seed fund, provided by COCOBOD for purchases of cocoa beans.

The impressive outing had been attributed to favourable and good policies by the present COCOBOD administration. Some of the policies include “The Living Income Differential” which has raised the income of cocoa farmers.

This performance coupled with favourable world market prices will boost exports and the country’s reserves and impact on the cedi.