Cocoa: FG earns N135B despite Covid-19 pandemic

Despite the bottlenecks created by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the cocoa sector has earned the country a sum of 135 Billion Naira from export into the international market, said the Executive Director (ED) Cocoa Research Institute (CRIN) Dr. Patrick Adebola.

 This was disclosed to Food Farm News during a chat with CRIN ED in Abuja recently.

According to Adebola ‘‘cocoa being one of the major foreign exchange earners has earned the country 135 Billion Naira despite the effect of the global pandemic disease of the year 2020’’ adding that ‘’ a ton of cocoa is now 2,500 dollar and what this translates is that cocoa farming is still very lucrative despite all the hurdles’’

He assured farmers of constant trainings that would add value to their produce saying that ‘’ We want to train farmers in good agricultural practices, the use of collapsible solar dryer which will be useful in terms of mini processing of cocoa after harvest. We will be carrying out training across the cocoa producing states in terms of good production practices that will enhance the yield in their farms. We also plan to train farmers on how to rehabilitate their old cocoa farms. You will agree with me that most of the cocoa farms are more than 40-50 years old and some have become moribund, and we want to train farmers who had such plantation on how to be able to carry out rehabilitation that will bring back these moribund farms back into life again'’

The CRIN boss pointed that farmers were supported in 2020 to cushion the effect of covid-19 saying ‘‘we supported farmers in various ways in 2020 as we are involved in the production of seedlings of improved varieties that we distribute to farmers.  We distributed more than three hundred  thousand seedlings of cocoa to farmers, and likewise we distributed the seedlings of improved varieties of kola, coffee, cashew and tea to farmers'’