The Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Coffee and Cocoa Board (Conseil Café Cacao) has just ended a 86-week-long census aimed at mapping all cocoa farm plots, gathering biodata of the farmers and their households as well as all those in the cocoa farming value chain, in the West African country.
Officials of the Coffee and Cocao Board say the census will enable farmers to be issued, very soon, with ID cards which will be used to capture their transactions, including the sales of cocoa beans and payments, while enabling the Board to deepen cocoa traceability.
The census data that CommoditiesExpertise was able to consult show that 993.031 coffee and cocoa farmers, of which 8% are women, cultivate a total of geo-referenced cocoa and coffee plots covering 3.220.800 hectares.
2.522.170 hectares house cocoa farm plots, while coffee farms cover an area of 110.470 hectares. The traditional mixed planting of cocoa and coffee accounts for 588.160 hectares.
The census operation that costed nearly 7 billion CFA francs (USD 14.000.000) and conducted by some 970 agents recruited and trained by the Ivorian Ministry of Agriculture also highlights that cocoa and coffee farms encroached into protected areas and reservations are estimated at 483.120 hectares.
