COCOBOD tackles Black Pod disease

The Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) is walking its talk by ensuring that anonom or Black Pod disease that has been a major headache for cocoa farmers is confronted head on.

The disease, is said, can result in over 70 per cent pod loss if not managed with outmost effectiveness.

The COCOBOD has, therefore, procured fungicides that would be used in spraying all Blackpod infested cocoa trees throughout the country, thrice within the year for free. The mass spraying is scheduled to commence in May, through December 2016.

For the first round spraying in May, COCOBOD is providing 686 metric tons of fungicide to be distributed to farmers for free.

Some 512 metric tons of fungicide would also be used for the second round spraying while 597 metric tons will be used for the third round of spraying. The spraying would be done by groups properly trained by the COCOBOD.

Some 60,000 hands who are on standby for action come, May 2016, have been provided with spraying machines and personal protective equipment including, overalls, broad-rim hats, goggles, nose masts, Wellington boots and hand gloves.

One unique thing about the current Mass Spraying Exercise is that the COCOBOD, farmers and community leaders are in charge of the exercise. The sprayers will be well supervised on the job and would be promptly paid for their services too.

Hitherto, District Chief Executives (DCEs) were put in charge for that job and, that made it easy for the chemicals to be smuggled outside the country.

To avert such diversion of chemicals this time, the COCOBOD is now working with the National Security and an extensive monitoring system has been put in place to ensure significant reduction in the pilfering of the chemicals.

In order to make maximum use of chemicals, staff of Cocoa Health and Extension Division (CHED) are expected to identify farms that are not diseased, or over 30 years, after which a GPRS machine is used to determine, accurately, the farm size making it easy to determine the quantity of chemicals to be allocated to farmers.

The spraying programme was restructured during the 2013/2014 season, leading to increase in the procurement of fungicides by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD).

For farmers to know much about the spraying exercise and other bold initiatives that the government, through COCOBOD is embarking upon for the first time, there is extensive use of radio, television and mobile phones to educate the farmers.

The COCOBOD has developed what is called ‘Cocoalink’, under which text messages are sent to farmers in English and Twi languages, on various interventions and extension services; and over 80,000 people have been hooked unto that platform.