Business
West Africa’s cocoa future threatened
No longer thinking of cocoa
Five years ago, as world spot gold prices began an unprecedented rally to around $1,900 an ounce in late 2011, poor cocoa farmers woke up to the possibility that salvation lay beneath their feet. While prices are now back around $1,300/oz, that is still three times higher than they were a decade ago.
Eight months ago, a local farmer discovered a gold vein near the town of Zahibo, west of Ivory Coast’s main cocoa hub of Daloa. Within weeks, diggers from all over the country and neighboring Burkina Faso began flooding in by the busload. Now, often prospecting at night and without the permission of landowners, their open-trench mines rip giant gashes through plantations.
The anarchy at the pits, where disputes over stakes have sparked deadly confrontations, recently pushed community leaders to call in the army. While damage to plantations and insecurity are major worries, Michel Gueya, the head of Zahibo’s local cooperative, said the main problem for cocoa farmers was a lack of labor.
“We’re no longer even thinking of doing coffee or cocoa,” he said. “This year, there’s been no production in our zone.” Gueya said every two weeks a buyer from Burkina Faso named Karim arrives in Zahibo and buys its gold production – between 30 and 35 kgs – before flying to Italy to offload it.
At a conservative price of 7,000 CFA francs per gram, that translates into a bi-monthly injection of $500,000 into a local economy where owning a motorbike once marked you as well-off. Gueya knows all this because, in addition to heading Zahibo’s cocoa co-op, he has become its main gold middleman.
At Kouassi’s plantation-turned-goldmine, Gervais Alledji, a 35-year-old digger, is waiting to get paid. Under an improvised shelter made of black plastic tarpaulin, an on-site buyer uses a hand scale to weigh a tiny pile of shiny yellow dust. “Day before yesterday, we had nine grams at 99,750 CFA francs and yesterday seven grams at 77,500 francs,” says Alledji, who works a mine with two partners. “Today we got three grams.”
Standing off to the side, Francois M’Bra, a cocoa farmer and president of a growers’ cooperative in the nearby town of Bouafle, shakes his head. All season he’s searched in vain for workers to harvest the pods on his plantation and dry the beans. “This guy just made 30,000 (francs) in a day. If you go and do cocoa, you’ll earn 240,000 for a year. Why would you do that?” he says. “If it continues on this scale, in five years you won’t be hearing much about cocoa from this zone.”
Copyright The Africa Report 2014
