Brazil and Ivory Coast cocoa update

5 August 2010 – In the Ivory Coast, president Laurent Gbagbo has said that the country could almost double cocoa production to two million tonnes over the next five years.

The statements were made as he started off his election campaign after a polling date was set for 31 October. “If I am elected president, it will be necessary for us to transform production over the next ten years,” Gbagbo says. Current production is around 1.2 million tonnes a year and is falling as years of political instability and paralysis take their toll on the ailing sector.

“We have started discussions with the countries that import our cocoa. They agree with the logic of our selling semi-finished products (rather than raw beans),” Gbagbo concludes.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s cocoa arrivals are lagging deliveries by this time last year, but the crop should still hit the forecast target as output perks up months into the harvest.

Bahia Commercial Association data showed that arrivals so far in the 2010/11 (May/April) season were down 6.4 percent by Aug. 1, at 1.21 million 60-kg bags compared with 1.3 million bags a year ago, the data showed. But deliveries from the main cocoa state, Bahia, were up, to 61,326 bags from 53,208 bags delivered that week a year ago.

"The flow of cocoa from Bahia will tend to increase over the next weeks and the 1.25/1.3 million bags target for the (mid crop) is very likely to be met," cocoa analyst Thomas Hartmann notes in a weekly update.

Hartmann says prospects for Bahia’s main crop, still about two months away, were also quite promising with current pod counts around 20 percent higher than for 2009’s main crop. “Unfortunately this picture is not shared by the other producing states where the outlook remains bleak for the Temporao (mid crop) as well as for the coming main crop,” he says.