2024-08-25 22:34:51
Cocobod, Ghana’s state body that manages the cocoa sector, has announced that they are abandoning the single loan with a group of banks, participating every year for more than 30 years. How will Ghana finance its next key campaign, brought forward to September 1?
Borrowing nearly one and a half billion dollars annually from a pool of banks to buy seeds, fertilizers, and then cocoa from Ghanaian farmers, this made things a lot easier for Cocobod. ” Cocobod does not have to negotiate with 15 or 20 banks, MEMORY OF Jean-François Lambert, former banker and financial advisor. You have a deal with a pool manager, with whom you can agree on a price and a large amount of money. And the head of the pool shared, had approvals with other banks. It is very easy to negotiate. »
But after those harvest disaster of 2023-2024 in Ghana, the agreement with the banking pool, already laborious last year, was not possible. ” What can be agreed upon? ? The key point is the level of production, underlines the consultation. Because if I borrow 100 and in fact my production only allows me to pay back 80, what happens ? We didn’t ask ourselves these kinds of questions two years ago. We are asking ourselves these questions now. So the more careful, the less money. »
Read againBasically, statistics from countries and manufacturers are in question
Cocobod will have to appeal to the traders
The commercial and financial partners of Cocobod still do not believe in the 40% production renewal promised by Cocobod in 2024-2025. The crisis is too deep in Ghana. « Every sector is confused, noted agronomist François Ruf. Inputs, for example fertilizer, which plants now need, are expensive and inefficient. We are beginning to have doubts about the relevance of the hybrid cocoa plant materials produced by the Ghana research, in the current conditions, where we have climate change, where we do not have fertilizer, where we have degraded the land. »
financial policy, with the cedi which is always decreasingstill not good enough. ” For a cocoa producer in Ghana, since Cocobod sets its price twice a year, this means that the price of its cocoa is constantly decreasing, underlined Francois Ruff. So these developers are going off topic. Ghana’s problems, and in particular, are structural. And bankers should know », it ends.
Cocobod says it can fund cocoa campaigns locally, in Ghana. Headlong flight or bluff aimed at the last foreign bank with which is the bilateral deal? In any case, calculates a trader, Cocobod will have to approach the traders, to whom it is more than 300,000 tons of beans, to get financing.
Read againThe cocoa market is also very concerned about West African supply
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