The Director General of the Coffee-Cocoa Council, the regulator of the sector, Brahima Yves Koné invited Friday in Abidjan, the Ivorian planters dissatisfied with the poor sale of brown gold internationally to "be patient", during a TV program.

”In the immediate future, I would like to ask our growers not to sell their products. They have to wait. I ask them to be patient”, recommended Mr. Koné on the RTI, the national television, before being reassuring on the continuation of the situation.

”The products will be released gradually. We are hopeful things will get better,” he said.

According to the general manager of the Coffee-Cocoa Council, “the companies that export to us, the exporters are faced with a problem of containers to export. The stores are full. If they don't export, they don't have room to bring the cocoa from the field to their store”.

A situation linked, according to him, to the “slowdown in economic activity due to the second wave of Covid-19 contamination, which is mainly in Europe. »

“The pandemic is hitting the economy as a whole, cocoa is not escaping and we are producing the cocoa that we are not consuming. The major consumers are first of all Europe, then the United States and finally Asia. If our main consumers are hit by the pandemic, cocoa becomes an accessory element for them,” Mr. Koné said.

"We are obliged to ask exporters to work at the rate of the containers and ships they have," he said as a solution to resolve the marketing difficulties faced by Ivorian cocoa.

Regarding compliance with the purchase price of a kilogram of cocoa set at 1,000 FCFA by the Ivorian authorities, Brahima Koné indicated that the price is “accepted in the field” and that “controllers enforce the price in the field”.

“We explain to the planters that the price is 1000 FCFA. Never to accept crooked buyers in their stores and to accept a price which is different from that which is officially fixed”, he recommends, before being firm towards “crooked buyers”.

”That they avoid taking advantage of our planters to cheat them. The council will be intractable, if someone tries to cheat them and we are informed, this operator will suffer the rigor of the law”, he hammered.

Côte d'Ivoire, the world leader in cocoa, is facing an accumulation of stocks of cocoa beans in the country's two major ports. A situation that annoys planters who are unable to sell their production and face a discount price.