Accra, July 22 - Ghana is unlikely to hit its target of registering production of more than 700,000 tonnes of cocoa in the 2007/8 season due to the smuggling of beans abroad, the industry's regulator Cocobod said on Tuesday.
Ghana's main crop harvest closed on June 5 having reached 663,558 tonnes, up 12.9 percent from last year. Cocobod had already forecast this year's light crop to yield at least 50,000 tonnes, which would bring the annual crop over 700,000 tonnes.
"The situation is serious and the indications are that we are unlikely to meet our new target," Cocobod Chief Executive Isaac Osei said.
Ghana's 2007/8 light crop started on June 27 but it opened slowly, with less than 5,000 tonnes purchased in the first week, down 10 percent on the same period last year.
Some in Ghana's cocoa industry, the world's No. 2 producer, had hoped that the 2007/8 production might top the previous record crop of 740,457 tonnes harvested in the 2005/6 season.
"I can say for now that we are denied of that opportunity of announcing a record harvest this year as a result of the smuggling," Osei told Reuters, without giving details of how much cocoa was being smuggled.
Osei said that traders from neighbouring Ivory Coast, the top global producer which lies to the west, were offering higher prices for the Ghanaian beans.
Ghana's government was forced to inrease its farmgate price for cocoa by more than 25 percent in February in an effort to stop smuggling of the main crop into Ivory Coast and Togo.
Some 30,000 tonnes of cocoa were believed to have already been smuggled by then.
Osei blamed some members of the security forces for aiding smugglers and he said that Cocobod was seeking ammendments to current legislation that would see those caught potentially sent to prison and not just fined.
Ghana has set itself an ambitious target to harvest at least 1 million tonnes of cocoa a year by 2010, mainly through increased use of fertiliser and adoption of high yielding seeds, combined with improved farming methods.