The Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) has commenced the sensitisation of farmers in the Ashanti Region on its new project, dubbed Cocoa Management System (CMS).
Under the project, COCOBOD will capture all relevant biometric information of all farmers, their households and lands, size of the land and its location, as well as land tenure arrangements between the farmers and their farm hands.
Dr. Emmanuel Opoku, Deputy Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of COCBOD (Operations), explained at a media encounter in Kumasi that the new project was a function of the need for reliable data to plan its activities.
The system will register al farmers and issue identity cards as a way of bringing all farmers in Ghana into a central portal, so that COCOBOD can have inter-connectivity within the value supply chain.
The COCOBOD Deputy CEO said the Cocoa Management System forms part of a global system based on technology to ensure fair competition in the industry.
According to the Dep. CEO, the system provides a digital platform which would capture cocoa sales, and input sales based on farmer population.
Dr. Opoku said the head count would enable Cocobod map out all cocoa farms in the country, the number of years the farms have been in existence, land size and farm hands, by which farmlands would be measured, registered and identity cards generated for farm owners.
He said every farmer will have an electronic account into which all payments of farm proceeds would be paid.
The new project, he assured, would ensure transparency in the supply chain, as well as discourage stealing of cocoa beans from neigbours as a way of reducing robbery in the cocoa industry.
He said the project, which would target high performing farmers for input support and education, is expected to be rolled into the national data from October this year, after it has successfully been piloted since 2019.
The COCOBOD Deputy CEO announced that so far about 120,000 cocoa farmers had been captured in the Western South of the Western Region since October 2019, and a mop up exercise is also underway in the Elubo and Buenso areas to ensure that all famers are hooked on to the system.
COCOBOD has, therefore, appealed to all farmers to cooperate with numerators and surveyors who have been detailed to see to the implementation of the project.
The cocoa marketing agency warned that farmers are not obliged to pay money to the numerators and surveyors, and that saboteur, who go out of their way and demand monies before executing their responsibilities, should be reported to the COCOBOD to be sanctioned.
“The CMS is free of charge and no farmer is allowed to pay any amount of money or item to the enumerators. Any enumerator found collecting any money will be severely dealt with,” the deputy COCOBOD CEO warned.
Dr. Opoku also explained that the CMS will enable the COCOBOD to implement the Cocoa Farmers’ Pension Scheme which was launched by President Nana Akufo-Addo in December 2020 in Kumasi to enable cocoa farmers make voluntary contributions towards their retirement to maintain decent livelihoods after retirement.
Dr. Opoku said “the cocoa pension scheme will only be feasible when accurate data are captured about the farmers through the CMS, which will provide a robust database of all cocoa farmers in the country and track their contributions to facilitate prompt payments of claims to beneficiary farmers.”
The post Cocobod begins head count of farmers in Ashanti Region appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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