The President of the Ghana National Cocoa Farmers Association, Anane Boateng is calling on the government to pay maximum attention to the cocoa sector and institute measures to make it more attractive to the youth.
He said this would strengthen the capacity of stakeholders to reform the sector and also prevent it from collapse.
“Honestly, the relationship between COCOBOD and the cocoa farmers is not the best. As a major stakeholder, we expect COCOBOD to engage us on policy issues to address the challenges affecting the sector, but that hasn’t been the case. We are always being sidelined, which we think is not good. The future of the cocoa sector looks bleak; we need to focus on exploring stakeholder approaches involving cocoa farmers and the COCOBOD to find solutions to the challenges in the cocoa sector,” he said on Plan B FM ‘Ebaanosen’ with Bohyeba Afriyie.
He also noted that cocoa farmers do not know how the electronic scale which is set to be rolled out to prevent LBCs from tampering is going to work, and as part of that, his association has put together a weighing scale monitoring team in collaboration with the Ghana Standards Authority to train their members to monitor how the electronic scale is going to operate.
The Ghana Cocoa Board announced it will in the coming months introduce electronic scales for weighing coacoa beans in Ghana. This move according to COCOBOD will curb the practice where Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) adjust their scales to cheat cocoa farmers.
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