Sierra Leone News: SLPMC to invest Le.10bn in Cocoa Next Year

The Sierra Leone Produce Marketing Company (SLPMC) wants to invest Le.10 billion in 2016 to buy about 1,000 metric tons of cocoa for export, 10 times the target for 2015.
The target for this year is 100 metric tons and the company has already bought about half that target and will probably reach the maximum before the 31st of December, Mr. Henry Kamara, Managing Director of SLPMC said in an interview on Tuesday.
 

“At the moment we are talking of 100 metric tons but next year we are talking of a thousand and more. The company has a contract with an international buyer who has assured SLPMC to buy all of their products,” he said.
China is gaining interest in Cocoa and America is increasing their consumption of the product, Mr. Kamara said. Cocoa is one of the commodities experiencing an increase in price according to the October 2015 IMF Regional Economic Outlook. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects the world market price of cocoa to increase up to 40 percent in 2016.

Some of the farmers abandoned their plantations during the period of the outbreak in 2014. SLPMC therefore did not partake much in buying cocoa in 2014. But the situation is different this year. “We hope to at least hit a maximum of 100 metric tons,” Mr. Kamara said.
One hundred metric tons is about eight 20ft containers. Each container of Cocoa weighs about 12.5 metric tons. Already the company has bought over 3 containers and hopes to hit its target before the end of December.

The West Africa belt accounts for about 70  75 % of the world cocoa and major players are Ivory Coast and Ghana. Ivory Coast accounts for about 1.2 million metric tons and Ghana accounts for about 1 million metric tons. Others include Cameroon and Nigeria. Sierra Leone produces between 18,000  25,000 metric tons a year, just below 1 percent of total world cocoa exports. Cocoa is the country’s major agricultural.

Source: Awoko