A senior COCOBOD official has warned Ghana’s cocoa industry could collapse without immediate action, saying illegal mining has already destroyed more than 100,000 acres of high yield plantations.
Samuel Essuman, Western South Regional Manager for COCOBOD’s Cocoa Health and Extension Division, raised the alarm while addressing farmers at Samahu during the presentation of Gold Fields Ghana Foundation’s Cocoa Farmers Support Programme. He said the losses, concentrated in the Ashanti, Western and Central regions, are already showing up in national output figures. “The reduction in export volumes is limiting foreign exchange earnings,” he said, adding that the shortfall is straining COCOBOD’s ability to settle its own operational debts and fund farmer welfare programmes.
Essuman described galamsey, the local term for illegal mining, as the single biggest threat facing the industry today, precisely because it is undoing work COCOBOD has already paid for. He pointed to a recent project rehabilitating disease affected cocoa farms in the region that had benefited farmers substantially, only for illegal miners to move onto some of those same restored plots. “When you visit some districts, you will be surprised by the extent to which galamsey activities are destroying farms that COCOBOD has invested so much to restore,” he said.
The warning is not a new one, even if the scale keeps growing. COCOBOD has previously said its National Cocoa Rehabilitation Programme, a roughly 4.8 billion cedi effort to revive diseased and moribund farms, has been losing ground to illegal mining for years, with officials citing cases such as 36.5 hectares of newly rehabilitated farmland in the Aowin municipality cut down for mining within a few years of restoration. Abdul-Majid Mumuni, Deputy Executive Director of the Cocoa Health and Extension Division, told farmers at Samahu that cocoa remains one of Ghana’s most important economic commodities and should not be traded away for short term mining income. “There is a future for the cocoa sector, and under no circumstances should farmers give out their cocoa farms for illegal mining activities,” he said, adding that government and COCOBOD are working on stronger sanctions to protect cocoa growing areas.
Robert Wisdom Cudjoe, MP for Prestea Huni-Valley, echoed the appeal, noting that some farmers sell their land to illegal miners for quick cash without weighing what they give up. “The money they take will feed them for a short time, but cocoa is there forever,” he said.
The Samahu event itself illustrates the kind of investment now at risk. Gold Fields enrolled 105 additional farmers this year from Awudua, Huniso, Pepesa, Tebe and Samahu, adding to 100 farmers admitted in 2025, with each beneficiary receiving inputs for a four acre cocoa farm and technical support over three production cycles. The Foundation says it has invested close to 112 million dollars in community development across education, health, agriculture and related sectors, a body of work officials say becomes harder to justify if illegal mining keeps reclaiming the land it is meant to help.
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