Abidjan, Aug 21 - Cocoa farmers in the east of world No.1 producer Ivory Coast still hope the forthcoming crop will be at least as big as this year's, but fear disease could lower bean quality, they said on Wednesday.
Cocoa prices on world markets <CCc1> hit a 28-year high of more than $3,000 per tonne in July, partly on worries about the Ivorian 2008/09 crop, but have since fallen to $2,707 on expectations of a good harvest.
The new cocoa season begins on Oct.1, and even if tonnages are good, quality will be low, farmers said.
"We will have problems with quality this year because there's a lot of disease around at the moment, which spoils the beans," said Charles Ehueni, owner of a 10-hectare cocoa plantation near Aboisso, in the south-east of the country.
"Still, we have to use them because without them, there wouldn't be a good tonnage," he said.
The main threat is black pod disease, which thrives in wet conditions.
"After the rains, black pod disease started to get at the pods, and I worry that it will spoil the harvest, because until now it's looked as though it's going to be a good one," said farmer Ano Kablan, who works near the border with Ghana, the world's second biggest cocoa producer.
"At the start it was just a a few pods which started to get the disease, but right now we are seeing more pods affected," he said.
FEAR OF A BLACK POD
A combination of rain and sun in late July gave farmers hope that beans would be high in quality and abundant in quantity, but wet and cold weather in mid-August raised fears the disease would affect many plants.
"The 2007/08 season was marked by very poor bean quality ... caused by humidity, and the risk for the next season is that we have the same problem, but more serious, not only has it rained but black pod disease has started to become widespread," said the commercial director of a major exporting firm in Abidjan.
Still, other farmers were more confident they would record a bumper haul in the coming season.
"This year we had lots of rain when the rain was supposed to come in May and June-July, and after that, the sun came out. Evrything is going well," said planter Claude Assale, whose farm in Niable is only 13 km (8.1 miles) from the Ghanaian border. "If things stay as they are, we won't need to do anything to make the coming season a good one," he said.
Analysts expect the 2008/09 harvest to reach 1.05-1.1 milion tonnes, compared with 1.05 million this year, and 904,000 tonnes in 2006/07.