SOURCE: Rite News
Ghana’s -Cocoa regulator, Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) says it will spend
one hundred and fifty million dollars to construct and improve roads in cocoa
growing communities during the 2014/15 season.
This follows a government directive that the Board should take over the award
of contracts and payment for cocoa roads in order to make the carting of
cocoa beans easy.
Speaking in Accra, Deputy Chief Executive of COCOBOD in charge of Agronomy
and Quality Control, Francis Oppong, said this forms part of efforts to revamp
the cocoa industry.
COCOBOD has also initiated the Cocoa Rehabilitation and Replanting program
which is to assist farmers to replant old, destroyed and abandoned farms. He
said about 50 million seedlings are to be distributed to cocoa farmers during
the 2014/15 season, adding that, it represents a substantial increase over the
11 million improved cocoa seedlings distributed to farmers for planting in the
last cropping season.
In relation to this, Nana Kwadwo Agyemang, a cocoa farmer at Twifo Praso
in the Central Region in an interview with Rite FM News, said that they find it
very difficult to transport cocoa beans and other farm products to the market
centres, thus, leaving hundreds of bags of cocoa beans to go waste due to the
bad nature of their roads
He lamented that the situation has become unbearable for many farmers, in
and around the Twifo Praso community. He therefore appealed to government
as a matter of urgency to save the situation by providing the township with
good roads.
According to him, the Twifo Praso community is one of the leading producers
of cocoa in the country and the provision of good roads there would go a long
way of easing some of the difficulties farmers face.
“Comparing roads Twifo Praso to that of neighbouring towns, there is a vast
difference in terms of quality and it would serve a very meaningful purpose if
roads in the surrounding Twifo Praso undoing are rehabilitated in order to cart
more cocoa from the farms which would benefit the nation.
