Heavy rain delay cocoa harvesr #nigeria

Heavy rainfall and poor sunshine across Nigeria's eastern
cocoa-growing region of Cross Rivers over the past week
will delay harvesting the new season's crop by at least a
month, the trade body and a farmer said on Monday.
Farmers in Nigeria, the world's fourth-biggest cocoa
grower, are growing increasingly worried about bean
quality and black pod disease in the wake of heavier rains.
Besides preventing mould, sunny weather is also needed for
bigger bean size. Cocoa trees need a delicate balance of
rainy and dry weather. Too little rain and they wither; too
much and they become susceptible to insects or fungal
black pod disease. Beans can also go moldy if small
farmers are unable to dry them outside.
"We have delayed harvest because of the weather ... but
from September we will start (to need) having sunlight to
dry cocoa," a farmer in the Cross Rivers region, which
produces annual volumes of around 60,000 tonnes, Neji
Abang told Reuters on phone.
The main-crop harvest is meant to start at the end of
August, Abang said, but farmers are worried about
harvesting pods without enough sunshine to dry them and
are leaving them on the trees. A spokesman for the Cocoa
Association of Nigeria, Godwin Ukwu, said some farmers
had put off the harvest to September and that heavy rains
had brought fungal black pod disease, because farmers
were unable to spray their pods.
"Output will likely drop (this season) if the rains continue
and blackpod disease intensifies," Ukwu said, adding that
he expected the rainfall to continue in August.
No official figures for the 2013/2014 cocoa output have
been released. The International Cocoa OrganiSation has
estimated the 2013/14 crop at 250,000 tonnes. Rainfall is
spreading across Nigeria's 14 cocoa-growing regions,
Robo Adhuse, a commodity analyst said. Ondo State,
Nigeria's biggest grower, has had intermittent sunlight that
is helping farmers dry the beans, but black pod is
spreading, he added.
Abang said farmgate prices in Cross Rivers had fallen
around 8 percent to 440,000 naira ($2,700) per tonne due to
mould. Mould levels were as high as 18 per cent, compared
with the three per cent that is considered acceptable, he
added.