By Loucoumane Coulibaly
ABIDJAN, Feb 10 (Reuters) – A halt to cocoa-buying in Ivory Coast is leaving beans to rot in farm warehouses, while smuggling through Ghana intensifies and some growers switch to other crops, farmers said on Thursday.
Economic sanctions, a cocoa export ban and a liquidity shortage since incumbent Laurent Gbagbo seized the central bank’s local branch has left the cocoa industry in chaos in the world’s largest grower as beans pile up in farms or are smuggled out.
Alassane Ouattara, who beat Gbagbo in a Nov. 28 presidential poll, according to U.N.-certified electoral commission results that Gbagbo refused to concede, last week called for a one-month cocoa registration ban to starve his rival of tax revenues.
Cocoa exporters, fearing sanctions by Western powers that recognise Ouattara’s win, have played ball.
In the western region of Soubre, at the heart of the cocoa belt, farmers and one cooperative manager said in interviews they no buyers were taking their beans last week and they feared the poorly dried beans stashed in their warehouses would rot. “Nothing’s moving, everything’s stopped,” said farmer Innocent Zamble, who runs a farm in the Soubre town of Meagui.
“Our stores are stuffed with beans and there’s no more space to stock them. We fear the quality is going to perish because we don’t have the capacity to stock big quantities long term.”