Abidjan, March 3 - Ivory Coast has appointed a cocoa reform committee and given it three months to suggest plans for overhauling the economically vital but troubled sector in the world's biggest grower, the government said.
Cocoa brings in around 40 percent of the West African country's export earnings, but despite soaring world prices in the past five years, the Ivorian industry has been dogged since liberalisation in 2000 by corruption, administrative disorder and poorly-maintained plantations, analysts say.
"The mission of the committee tasked with reforming the coffee and cocoa sector is to suggest to the government the direction of new reforms," according to a presidential decree signed on Feb. 27 and published on Monday.
Key to the reforms will be plans to lower taxes in order to bring the revenue farmers receive for their crop into line with other cocoa producers, a condition of World Bank debt relief.
In November the World Bank said Ivorian farmers get 35-40 percent of the international market price, while their counterparts in Ghana and Nigeria receive up to 70 percent. Two months earlier, the government replaced the sector's management bodies with a temporary committee to run the 2008/09 season, and pledged widespread reform.
The amount of cocoa available for export from Ivory Coast is much lower than at the same time last year, though farmers hope volumes will pick up later in the season.
Cocoa futures for delivery in May traded at 1,740 pounds per tonne in London on Tuesday, almost unchanged from the start of the year, after taking support in part from worries about disruption and disease cutting into the Ivorian harvest.
The International Cocoa Organization widened its global cocoa deficit forecast on Tuesday to 193,000 tonnes in 2008/09, ascribed mainly to lower production.