College graduate Omatayo Adeniyi stands in a humid tropical forest of southwest Nigeria and explains why he chose cocoa farming over a white-collar job in the city.
“There is money in the ground. The future is bright. I hope to make one tonne of cocoa by next year,” he said from his farm in Ondo State.
Such optimism has for decades been rare among Nigeria’s cocoa farmers. Many abandoned their fields and moved to cities in search of alternative work after commodity prices collapsed in the mid-1980s and the country’s booming oil industry siphoned investment away from agriculture.
However, years of focus on oil revenues has left Nigeria with a lack of industrial diversity and made it over-dependent on energy, which uses a lot of costly equipment, but employs few people. So while the economy has been growing at an average of 7 percent for the past five years, it has failed to create jobs for many of the nation’s 170 million people.
High unemployment and poverty levels have prompted the Nigerian government to look again at cocoa with the aim of getting more people to grow a product for which prices have been rising.
Adeniyi’s trees were supplied by the government, which is also distributing plant pods and disease resistant seeds at subsidized rates, alongside cheap fertilizers, agricultural chemicals and training to improve practices.
Nigerian Minister of Agriculture Akinwumi Adesina aims to boost production to 1 million tonnes a year by 2018 — on a par with current No. 2 global producer Ghana and approaching top grower Ivory Coast’s projected 1.8 million tonnes for this year.
Nigeria says it is already on track to produce 500,000 tonnes of cocoa next year, double what it grew in 2012, and though analysts say that target might be optimistic, it is clear that no other cocoa growing country is boosting production as fast.
Output from the world’s top four growers — Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia and Nigeria — which makes up more than 70 percent of global production, is projected to rise in this year after staying flat for two years, according to Africa’s Ecobank.
“Nigeria has been underperforming for many years because of a lack of investment and the discovery of oil. But in the last two years, there’s been genuine commitment ... to develop agriculture,” Ecobank head of research Edward George said.
Nigeria currently grows cocoa on less than a quarter of the 3 million hectares of land suitable to produce the beans, and the government is encouraging farmers to expand to the uncultivated savannah grassland.
With the materials the state provides, crops are flourishing. Adeniyi received high-yield, disease-resistant seeds from the government two years ago and planted 800 seedlings, of which 700 survived — much more than usual. The new trees flower within 18 to 24 months instead of three to five years.
“The materials will increase output more than three times from what farmers had before,” Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria director Leila Dongo said.
However, infrastructure still poses a problem — bad roads hamper the transport of beans to market — and many producers are at the mercy of the weather because of their rudimentary operations.
In a leafy plantation where rows of cocoa trees sit 10cm apart to let in air and sunshine, farmer Rafiu Saliu demonstrates the problem. Picking up a pod from a just-harvested heap he shows how most of it has gone black with fungal disease.
Farmers like Saliu rely on the whims of weather for growing and drying their crops. This year Saliu faced a dilemma: leave pods on trees until the rains pass, and risk them over ripening, or harvest them and risk mold levels exceeding the maximum 5 percent allowed on the market.
“If not for the rains, we should be harvesting. All the pods are ripe,” 65-year-old Saliu said as more dark clouds spread over his 4 hectare farm.
Samuel Oyebade, head of the government’s cocoa reform plan in its main growing region Ondo State, told reporters that talks were afoot with US chocolate manufacturer Spagnvola to set up a chocolate factory in which the state would invest about $5 billion naira to build, while Spagnvola would manage the production for export and some local consumption.
Nigeria’s beans have been deemed by the global market unsuitable for chocolate because of their high moisture content and so tend to be used more in cake, butter and soaps.
However, with input from a US chocolate expert, its beans could yet make it to premium buyers, for premium prices.
“The industry says cocoa beans from Africa are inferior to those from South America and the Caribbean ... [but] it’s how you treat that beans that renders the flavor ... every single tree has the potential for producing fine flavour,” Spagnvola chief executive Eric Reid said.
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