Abidjan, Oct 16 - Cocoa farmers threatened to blockade top grower Ivory Coast's second port of San Pedro from Monday if exporters don't increase purchase prices in line with a reference guide price, a farmers' union said on Wednesday.
Ivory Coast's cocoa management committee raised the reference farm-gate price by 40 percent to 700 CFA francs ($1.46) per kg when it opened the 2008/09 season on Oct. 5, though exporters say the new price is too high.
"At the moment merchants are paying us 350-400 CFA/kg in the bush, whereas the price given out by the committee is 700 CFA francs. That is too big a difference, and we won't accept it. That's why we're going on strike," Joseph Yao Kouame, head of the SAPICOCI union, told Reuters by telephone from San Pedro.
"We have given instructions to all the producers in the area and nobody is selling their cocoa to anybody at the moment. If the (cocoa trading) warehouses open on Monday we will go ourselves to force them to close," Kouame said.
The reference price is a recommended minimum rather than an officially-enforced rate in Ivory Coast's liberalised system, but industry officials have urged farmers to seek high prices.
"We find our cocoa is not being bought at this price, so we are stockpiling cocoa in our villages and compounds," said a formal strike notice published by SAPICOCI on Wednesday.
"If nothing is done by 7 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Oct. 20, 2008, all the coffee and cocoa producers in Ivory Coast will go on strike indefinitely across the whole country," it said.
SAPICOCI groups individual farmers and cooperatives in the San Pedro area, so while activities in San Pedro port could be disrupted, industry analysts said it was unlikely the union could disrupt operations nationally unless others joined in.
Benchmark U.S. cocoa futures have lost almost a third of their value since hitting a long-term high of $3,290/tonne in July, but are still more than 10 percent up since the start of 2008.
San Pedro, Ivory Coast's second port after the commercial capital Abidjan, handled nearly half the national cocoa crop in the 2007/08 season which ended Sept. 30, with port arrivals of just over 600,000 tonnes out of 1.36 million nationwide.
SAPICOCI is one of a host of overlapping unions in Ivory Coast's cocoa sector, many of which often stage strikes or other protests early in the season in a bid to boost farm-gate prices.