RI cocoa farmers ready to boost crop

RI cocoa farmers ready to boost crop

ABIDJAN (Reuters): Indonesia's cocoa farmers are ready to increase their crop to over 500,000 tons in spite of low world prices and poor spraying against diseases, a leading cocoa researcher said on Wednesday.

"The (government) objective of 500,000 tons or more is very realistic in spite of the havoc wreaked by the pod borer and in spite of the slump in cocoa prices," French researcher Francois Ruf told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Due to low world prices farmers currently put less work and less pesticides into their farms, leading to an increased occurrence of the cocoa pod borer, a tiny moth whose larvae bore through the husk into the pulp, affecting bean development.

Indonesia, the world's third largest cocoa producer after Ivory Coast and Ghana, produced 362,000 tons of cocoa in 2000 (Jan-Dec).

"It is difficult to calculate when it (the increase) is going to happen but on (Indonesia's main cocoa producing island of) Sulawesi the output is going to go up," said Ruf, who is based in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan.

He said that in 1998 large numbers of farmers moved deep into the forest of Sulawesi, formerly called Celebes, and started clearing land. The run on land was a result of a spectacular rise in the cocoa farmgate price.

In 1998 prices jumped from Rp 2,500 to Rp 17,000 per kg due to the collapse of the local currency, which depreciated by 500 percent against the dollar.

Not all farmers immediately planted cocoa on their newly cleared land due to ownership conflicts and a preference for planting pepper, Ruf said.

He said pepper was popular partly because its farmgate price had multiplied by six during the 1998 currency crisis.

"But I am sure that in the end cocoa is going to win (over pepper)," he said.

In the book co-edited by Ruf "Agriculture in Crisis", on developments in Indonesia's agricultural sector from 1996 to 2000, the French economist and his co-authors say they believe Indonesia is close to becoming the world's second-largest cocoa producer.