Cocoa farmers’ anger runs deeper than a price cut — Dr. Peter Boamah Otokuno
The discontent rippling through Ghana’s cocoa farming communities may have been brought to a head by February’s producer price reduction. Still, a senior presidential official says the frustration has been building for far longer, and its roots stretch back nearly a decade.
Dr. Peter Boamah Otokunor, Director of Presidential Initiatives in Agriculture and Agribusiness at the Office of the President, reported on a series of engagements with cocoa farmers across the Western Region, noting that these conversations revealed a community whose grievances predate the current administration’s controversial pricing decision by several years.
Speaking to JoyNews’ Gemma Appiah, Dr. Otokunor pointed directly at the record of the previous administration, arguing that cocoa farmers were effectively shortchanged during years when global prices would have justified better returns at the farmgate.
“In 2017 to 2020, not a single cedi was added to the farmer’s producer price,” he said.
Even when adjustments were eventually made from 2020 onward, he argued, they were inconsistent. They fell well short of reflecting developments in international markets, a period that, by 2024, would see global cocoa prices peak at over $12,000 per tonne. Farmers who lived through those years of stagnation, Dr. Otokunor suggested, have long memories.
The remarks come at a particularly sensitive moment for Ghana’s cocoa sector. In February 2026, the Mahama government reduced the producer price from GH¢3,625 to GH¢2,587 per 64-kilogram bag, a significant cut that triggered widespread anger in farming communities. The government has defended the decision as unavoidable, pointing to a dramatic reversal in global cocoa fortunes: prices that once soared above $12,000 per tonne in late 2024 have since plummeted to approximately $3,772 per tonne by early 2026, fundamentally altering the economics of the sector.
Dr. Otokunor has maintained that alignment with international market realities is not optional, and that the price reduction, however painful, reflects conditions beyond the government’s control.
But the engagements he has been conducting across cocoa-growing regions are surfacing concerns that go beyond the current price debate. At a community meeting in Jejeti in the Atiwa East District, Dr. Otokunor alleged that funds specifically designated to support the education of cocoa farmers’ children had been diverted under the previous administration. He further claimed that resources from the cocoa sector had been redirected toward road construction in areas with little connection to cocoa production, a diversion he presented as emblematic of a broader failure to reinvest the sector’s proceeds in the communities that generate them.
The stakes of getting this right are considerable. Ghana’s cocoa sector supports approximately 800,000 farm families and remains one of the country’s most critical sources of foreign exchange, contributing roughly $2 billion annually to the national economy. Against that backdrop, the ongoing regional engagements are being positioned not merely as a public relations exercise, but as the foundation of a broader reform agenda intended to stabilise the industry and restore farmer confidence.
Whether farmers, many of whom have weathered years of unmet promises, will be persuaded that this time is different remains the central question. For now, the government is showing up, listening, and making its case. The farmers, for their part, have plenty to say.
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