Nigeria Cocoa Midcrop Battles Amid Sparse Rains, Heat
Category: Cocoa
(Bloomberg) – Nigeria’s midcrop cocoa harvest is threatened by sparse rains and a heat wave in the main producing region in the southwest, a farmers’ group said.
Nigeria’s two cocoa harvests include the main crop from October to December, and the smaller midcrop from April to June, estimated at 66,000 metric tons in the 2013-14 season. Most of the country’s output is from farmers working on small plots in the southern cocoa belt.
Two “scanty showers” in January were inadequate to create the moisture needed by the trees for flowering and fruiting, Adeniyi Adegoke, coordinator of the Ondo State Cocoa Farmers Association, said by phone Thursday from the cocoa-trading town of Akure.
The southwest of Nigeria accounts for about 70 percent in the output of the country, which is the world’s number four producer after Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia. The West African nation produced 350,000 metric tons of cocoa in the 2013-2014 season, according to the Agriculture Ministry. The International Cocoa Organization assessed Nigeria’s production for that season at 240,000 tons.
In Oyo state, which is experiencing similar weather, “flowers have started to dry out and fall as a result,” Joseph Ojedeji, who leads the state’s cocoa farmers’ association, said by phone from the city of Ibadan.
The current weather, dictated by north-south winds from across the Sahara Desert, will probably continue until the end of March, John Chigbu, head of the Meteorological Office in Lagos, the commercial capital, said in an interview in his office. By then rain-bearing, south-west winds from the Atlantic Ocean are expected to become dominant, leading to more showers.
In the southeastern cocoa-growing area around the town of Ikom that produces about 30 percent of Nigeria’s crop, the rains have been more frequent, leaving trees with adequate moisture, according to Femi Iwaloye, a manager at Saro Agro Ltd., a cocoa exporter.
Cocoa rose 0.1 percent to close at 2,975 pounds per ton in London on Thursday, gaining for the 12th day in the longest rising streak in 36 years.
