INTRODUCTION
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press, good afternoon.
We are here to record the NPP’s concerns about the Ghana Cocoa Board Bill, 2026, passed in the last week of July under a Certificate of Urgency.
We do not oppose reform. PNDCL 81 is overdue for replacement. We support traceability, value addition, and a guaranteed floor for the farmer’s share.
Our objection is the manner of travel, and provisions that will hurt the very farmers they claim to protect.
A good cause has been undone by a bad process.
1. WHY THIS BILL MATTERS
No law passed this year touches more households: some 800,000 farming families, three million Ghanaians, two billion dollars a season.
And the sector is in trouble. Output has fallen from a peak of 1.047 million tonnes to around 650,000, with a further 16 per cent fall projected next season. Ninety thousand hectares await rehabilitation for swollen shoot.
The cost of getting this wrong will not be paid in Accra, but in Sefwi Wiawso, Offinso, Goaso and Enchi.
2. A FLAWED PROCESS: LEGISLATING WITHOUT THE FARMER IN THE ROOM
The Bill was laid on 28th July and passed the same week: PNDCL 81 repealed entirely, an industry re-legislated, a tribunal and new criminal offences created, all in days.
A Certificate of Urgency is not unconstitutional, but its use must be proportionate. A pricing window that opens every September cannot justify rushing a law of this permanence.
The Majority says a consultant toured the country. The record does not show it.
- No engagement report was laid before the joint Committee.
- Neither national cocoa farmer association was consulted.
- LICOBAG’s formal concerns were not incorporated.
- The Cocoa Hauliers Association was not consulted at all.
The 2026 Bill also differs materially from the 2025 Bill reviewed in committee. Members passed a text no stakeholder had seen.
A law made for cocoa farmers, without cocoa farmers, is not reform. It is imposition.
3. PROVISIONS THAT REQUIRE FURTHER SCRUTINY
3.1 Clause 4: Restrictions on the Mandate of the Cocoa Board
Clause 4(a) is sound: it confines COCOBOD to the regulation, development, marketing, quality assurance, traceability, pricing and export of cocoa. That is the discipline it has lacked.
Clause 4(b) undoes it. COCOBOD may assume another Ministry’s responsibilities by enactment, or with the prior approval of the Minister. That final limb is the loophole: a restriction a Minister can lift is not a restriction, but a formality. The gateway back should be an Act of Parliament, not a signature.
3.2 Clause 57: The Cocoa Pricing Formula
Clause 57(3) sets the producer price at not less than 70 per cent of the Gross Free On Board price realised by the Board. We welcome a statutory floor. But seventy per cent of what, and who verifies it?
And the language has changed. The earlier version said world market price. The enacted text says realised Gross FOB. The world market price is observable on the ICE exchanges. The realised Gross FOB is an internal computation, blended across forward contracts fixed months or seasons earlier, known with certainty only to COCOBOD. To tie the farmer’s entitlement to a denominator only one party can calculate is not a guarantee. It is a promise with the arithmetic withheld.
So: will that computation and the underlying contracts be published each season? Will the Committee’s workings be independently audited? Will farmers see the numbers before the price is announced?
3.3 Clause 59: Categories of Licences
Every activity in the licensing list is already private, with one exception: external marketing, today the preserve of the Cocoa Marketing Company. Its inclusion implies Government intends, in time, to license private exporters.
That does not serve the nation. Our greatest advantage is that we sell as one seller. Centralised marketing through CMC underpins our forward sales programme, our price stabilisation, our quality premium, and our ability to negotiate jointly with Cote d’Ivoire, as on the Living Income Differential. Fragment the seller and we surrender our only leverage.
Nor is this hypothetical. Under Cocoa Sector Strategy I, an NDC administration moved to let qualifying LBCs, including Cashpro, export 30 per cent of purchases. Kufuor halted it in 2001. Is Clause 59 that policy returning through a licensing door?
3.4 Clause 81: Prohibited Activities on Protected Farms
Clause 81(a) bars any person from destroying, uprooting, damaging or felling a cocoa tree except for rehabilitation approved by the Board. The intention, to stop cocoa farms becoming galamsey pits, we share. The drafting is indiscriminate: it criminalises good husbandry.
On a well managed farm, trees are removed as routine practice. Under this clause a farmer may not thin overcrowded trees, may not fell a moribund tree while pruning, and may not rogue a tree infected with swollen shoot, which CRIG’s own protocol requires urgently, until approval is obtained.
Swollen shoot spreads by mealybug from tree to tree. Delay in roguing one infected tree is measured in infected neighbours. A permit requirement will slow disease control with 90,000 hectares already under rehabilitation.
And a farmer who no longer wishes to grow cocoa must get approval to repurpose his own land: an encumbrance on property, without compensation or timeline.
The clause is unenforceable as drafted and invites abuse: arbitrary arrest, extortion at the farm gate, harassment of farmers. Given the abuse of sections 207 and 208 of Act 29 and the weaponisation of the courts, we have no confidence the farmer will be spared.
The remedy: exempt removals made under COCOBOD’s published agronomic guidelines, and require approval only to convert a registered cocoa farm to non cocoa use.
3.5 Clause 85: Registration of Farmers and Farms
Clause 85(1) requires every farmer and farm to be registered on the Cocoa Management System. Clause 85(2) then bars commercial production, purchase or sale unless both are. So an unregistered farmer is outside the law and cannot lawfully sell his crop.
Registration began in 2019. On COCOBOD’s own last update, 792,954 farmers were registered and 1.2 million hectares mapped, against 800,000 households and 1.27 million hectares under harvest. Progress, but not complete, and COCOBOD admits difficulties in the field.
The critical point: farmers do not register themselves. Registration is COCOBOD’s responsibility. A farmer no enumerator has reached has committed no default, yet Clause 85(2) places the consequence on him. That criminalises farmers for an administrative failure that is not theirs. It should not commence until the Minister certifies registration substantially complete.
3.6 Clause 106: Local Processing Threshold
Clause 106(2) requires a local processing threshold of not less than 50 per cent of beans produced. We have always championed value addition. But an ambition is not a plan.
The binding constraint is not factory capacity. It is price. Grinding capacity is about 504,780 tonnes a year, yet grindings average 210,000 to 220,000 tonnes, below half. A 50 per cent threshold on a 650,000 tonne crop means 325,000 tonnes, over 100,000 above anything Ghana has recently ground.
We have the factories. They stand idle for want of affordable beans. Processors face no limit on quantity, only on price: light crop at a 20 per cent discount, main crop at full FOB.
So: at what price will main crop beans go to local processors? If discounted, who absorbs it, COCOBOD, the Consolidated Fund, or the farmer’s 70 per cent floor? A discounted domestic sale reduces the realised Gross FOB from which the farmer’s minimum is computed, so the guaranteed 70 per cent can fall in cedi terms because Government is subsidising processors. Parliament legislated both without reconciling them.
4. THE CREDIBILITY QUESTION: WHY FARMERS DO NOT TAKE THIS ON TRUST
A statutory floor is only as good as a government’s willingness to honour it.
August 2025: the season opens at 51,660 cedis a tonne, announced as 70 per cent of a 7,200 dollar Gross FOB. On 12th February, mid season, it is cut to 41,392 cedis, down 28.6 per cent, on farmers who had already planted, sprayed and harvested.
A farmer in Sefwi Wiawso lost 1,038 cedis on every bag: money already committed to school fees, to labour hired, to inputs bought on credit. Not a forecast that failed, but a price announced, relied upon, then withdrawn. Their scepticism is earned.
So, two commitments. We will monitor Clause 57 season by season and demand publication of the workings behind every price. And the next NPP administration under Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia will not cut a producer price mid season once announced.
A price announced to the Ghanaian farmer will be a price honoured to the Ghanaian farmer.
5. WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
To His Excellency the President: withhold assent and return this Bill for broader consultation. The pricing window can be handled administratively. A defective statute cannot.
To Parliament, on reconsideration:
- narrow Clause 4(b), so that widening the mandate needs an enactment;
- publish and independently audit the realised Gross FOB each season;
- confirm that external marketing remains vested in CMC;
- amend Clause 81 to exempt removals made under COCOBOD’s guidelines;
- defer Clause 85(2) until registration is certified complete;
- state the price basis for beans sold to local processors.
And to LICOBAG, the farmer associations, the hauliers and the processors: put your positions on the public record.
6. CONCLUSION
Ghana’s cocoa industry was built over a century by families who planted trees that would not bear for five years. They are owed better than a law made in haste, in their absence.
We support reform. We cannot support a text that criminalises good husbandry, that criminalises farmers for COCOBOD’s registration backlog, that opens the door to fragmenting external marketing, and that ties the farmer’s entitlement to a figure no farmer can verify.
Return the Bill. Consult the farmer. Fix the clauses. Then pass a law the whole industry can stand behind.
As it stands, major provisions in this new cocoa board law will hurt farmers.
Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press.
N.P.P: DEVELOPMENT IN FREEDOM
