Ghana’s cocoa sector risks deeper instability unless government urgently settles months of unpaid farmer arrears before rolling out broader reforms, Nana Aduna II, spokesperson for the Ghana Cocoa Farmers Association, has warned.
Speaking on the Asaase Breakfast Show on Thursday (12 February) ahead of an expected emergency financing announcement by the Finance Ministry, Nana Aduna said many farmers have not been paid for cocoa delivered since November 2025, starving rural communities of their primary source of income.
“Whatever financial instrument they announce must first pay the backlog,” he said. “Farmers have not been paid for four months, but Cocobod staff have been paid. It doesn’t make sense. Farmers fund the entire system.”
He described the crisis as structural rather than temporary, arguing that Ghana’s cocoa trade has been treated as a political tool rather than a business.
“Cocoa is business, not politics,” he said. “But we keep running it like a political football.”
According to him, decades of reliance on borrowing against forward sales has left Ghana locked into low-price contracts while international traders reap the real value of the commodity.
“When prices shot up to over $10,000 a tonne, we were stuck supplying at far lower contracted prices. That’s the trap of the syndicated loan model,” he explained.
Beyond immediate payments, Nana Aduna called for a fundamental overhaul of Cocobod’s structure, saying the institution’s overhead costs and staffing levels are unsustainable.
He proposed slimming the organisation to three core functions — marketing, research and quality control — while redirecting technical staff into production and value addition.
“The rest is excess cost,” he argued. “You can’t keep running an expensive bureaucracy on the backs of unpaid farmers.”
He also urged government to accelerate local value addition beyond chocolate manufacturing, pointing to opportunities in cocoa husk products, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, beverages and tourism.
“There’s far more money in value-added products than exporting raw beans,” he said. “I can make many times more from processed products than selling a bag of beans.”
As a long-term fix, he proposed establishing a regional cocoa commodities exchange within West Africa, where Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire together produce nearly 70 percent of global cocoa.
“The price of cocoa should be set here, not in London or New York,” he said. “Farmers should sell directly through an exchange and get the real value.”
But for now, he insisted, the priority is simple: “Find the money and pay the farmers first.”
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