Cocoa making a comeback

Plans to rehabilitate and revive cocoa production in Dominica are progressing satisfactorily and DEXIA has already secured a long-term arrangement with a buyer in Europe to purchase all of Dominica’s cocoa beans.

DEXIA is expected to undertake its first shipment of a 20-foot container load of dried cocoa beans to JHB International Trade & Finance S.A, a Belgian company, during the October to December cocoa crop. To this end, the Agency in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment and other stakeholders has been working on a number of initiatives to revive Dominica’s cocoa trade.

Part of the efforts includes a programme to rehabilitate over a three-year period, three hundred acres of cocoa. Notwithstanding the fact that Dominica still has a strong production base, much of the plots exist in a semi-abandoned state. There is therefore an urgent need to rehabilitate the plots and expand the production base in some instances.

In an attempt to fast-track the process, DEXIA in partnership with JBH International has contracted the services of a cocoa technician from Grenada, Mr. Gabrielle Lalette, to assist with the training of cocoa farmers and agricultural extension officers. Lalette is expected in Dominica from the 11th to 15th of June 2007. While on island, he will hold discussions with staff of DEXIA and the Ministry of Agriculture and conduct four on-farm training exercises with cocoa farmers in the Northeast, East, North, West coast, and Southeast.

A.J Hachamoth, Director of JHB International is also expected to visit Dominica during the same period to continue business discussions with DEXIA and undertake familiarization visits to cocoa farms.

Theodora Anthony, Crop Development Consultant at DEXIA says she expects the training to “equip the farmers and extension offices with the requisite knowledge and technology to carry out the rehabilitation of the cocoa plots to the level where we want them.”

Meanwhile DEXIA has been pursuing medium to long-term arrangements with two of the cocoa processing facilities on island for use of their plants to process the beans for exports. DEXIA will purchase all of the wet cocoa beans from farmers and process them for exports.

Already, two trial samples of dried beans have been shipped to Europe and preliminary results indicated that Dominica’s quality is excellent and is expected to do very well on the European market.