According to Reuters Cote d’Ivoire’s Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC) is introducing reforms to provide a boost to domestic exporters, including reducing the fees they pay when purchasing beans.
The new reforms will also limit the stockpiling by multinational traders, who are currently allowed to stockpile 10% more than their export contracts. Under the new recommendations, this will be reduced to 2%.
According to domestic exporters, stockpiling by the big companies drives up prices and prevents them from fulfilling export contracts of their own, putting them at risk of default, even while the large companies sat on unused stocks.
The new reforms are recommendations from an audit ordered by the CCC. The audit found domestic exporters have been paying specific fees to the CCC, including for storage and security, both when purchasing excess cocoa beans from multinationals and again when exporting.
This double payment added 40.6 CFA francs (£0.055) per kilo to export costs to the domestic exporters. The double payment was due to an error in the CCC’s system for calculating fees.
CCC stated that they had already started carrying out some of the reforms and planned to have them all in place by the start of the 2020/21 growing season in October.
