The Chief Executive of Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), Joseph Boahen Aidoo, has explained what accounted for the rise in the cost of its expenses in 2023.
According to the Auditor General’s Report, COCOBOD’s head office expenditure surged to approximately GH¢3.4 billion in 2023, something the Minority in Parliament raised concerns about.
In an interaction with journalists in Accra Wednesday, August 07, 2024, the Ranking Member on the Food, Agriculture, and Cocoa Affairs Committee of Parliament, Eric Opoku, expressed some concerns.
“In 2023, cocoa production declined further to 655,000 but office expenditure did not decline. It increased to GH¢3.4 billion. And the Auditor General reports to Parliament that this is largely due to headquarters expenditure. So COCOBOD head office alone is expending GH¢3.4 billion, while the entire Ministry of Agriculture is expending something around GH¢2.7 billion. Isn’t that strange?” he quizzed.
In an interview with the media after meeting the Public Accounts Committee Tuesday, August 20, 2024, the CEO, Mr. Boahen Aidoo, explained that the rehabilitation programme the Board did for cocoa farmers accounted for the increase.
“You know the rehabilitation program is something that was not existing. We came because farms were diseased, there’s no known remedy, there’s chemical remedy. The only way is to cut the trees and replant which the farmers cannot do.
“We’ve seen it over the years that farmers have not been able to do that on their own. So the government together with COCOBOD decided to make a major intervention which we call the rehabilitation program. And once you have such a program, you have to spend.
“And if you are spending, definitely your incentive costs will go up. So a lot of that money is going into payment of the workers who are working in the field. We are talking about planting materials and then various activities.
“Because almost everything is being done for the farmers, for the provision of even planting circuits and planting. I’ve quite often explained that if you leave it with a farmer, ordinarily a farmer can cultivate just a pole. A pole is a 40 ounce plant.
“So even if you take it as an acre, a farmer can do an acre a year. If you give yourself 10 years, you would have done 10 acres. Now, when the disease strikes, the farmer has to cut all the 10 acres, every part, everything, at a go.
“And the cost of doing that is number one. Labor into that. Even the type, there’s no way a farmer in Ghana can cut 10 hectares of land and then decide to plant on his own. Or even with a farmer. They cannot do it. That’s why I can intervene to lead for them.
“And then also pay compensation in respect of land tenure issues involved and all that. So we have a lot of expenditure going on there. But the question that came up is that whereas the expenditure there is going up, it is not corresponding with our production and that is obvious. It’s so obvious that these are young farms. When you have the rehabilitation, these early stages, you don’t expect to see yield. And the audit was in 2023. But going forward, from now on, we are going to see improvements in the yield. The production is definitely going to change,” he explained.
