The Deputy CEO of COCOBOD, Dr Emmanuel Opoku, has warned if companies who commit fraudulent cocoa licensing acts by using other people’s licenses to make cocoa transactions will be punished.
Dr. Opoku stated offenders will be penalised according to the ‘internal guidelines and regulations’.
His comments derived from a recent JoyNews investigation which exposed how some Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) and farmer society groups illegally rent their certification licenses to businessmen to enable them to export regular cocoa as certified ones. They discovered certification licenses could be rented out for as high as 1 million Ghanaian cedis (Approx. 170,000 US Dollars) to businessmen.
Dr Emmanuel Opoku said,
We are going to stop any cocoa, certified or not so long as the company has been identified in this kind of malpractice. This is because the source or status cannot be identified.
In order for COCOBOD to pay farmers a premium for growing certified cocoa, the organisation said it ‘undertook a foundation process to sanitise the Cocoa Sustainability Program’.
Dr. Opoku said a committee will be set up to make investigations into the matter. He cannot believe why some people will do this to the farmers who they claim to be supporting.
A further question is whether this alleged fraud has fooled companies like OLAM, who have recently claimed 100% traceability in their supply chain – see this story.
