President of the Ghana National Cocoa Farmers Association, Stephen Anane Boafo, says his organization had tried partnering with the PBC to buy their cocoa products.

According to him, the cocoa farmers were willing to make the deal due to the reason that other cocoa buying firms had not been treating them satisfactorily.

He stated that he, like many other cocoa farmers, were hopeful that with the partnership with PBC some of those unremarkable situations they had had with other cocoa buying companies would be gone.

But much to their chagrin, they realised that the PBC was out of funds, thus payment of their goods were unduly delaying.

“But along the line we saw that they were not ready to pay to partner us which can only mean that the money was not there. When we sent our cocoa produce to any of the PBCs its difficult that they pay us, they don’t get money to pay us. And I mean the commission buyers they also buy the cocoa from us, they keep it, and then because monies are not coming, they also sell it to other colleagues.

“So it became a problem for them. And we Cocoa Farmers Association along the line, we sat somewhere, we had this discussion and we even confronted them,” he said on JoyNews PM Express.

He said despite attempts to reach out to PBC for a stakeholder engagement on the reasons for the delayed payment, “nobody was responding to our case.”

“So we decided that well, if that is the case, when you send your produce to PBC they find it difficult to pay you. So we should also look for other way round…because we need money.”

PBC is currently heavily indebted and has lost market share to competitors in the cocoa buying sector.