Ghana cocoa purchases up 5.8 pct on year
Tue Feb 7, 2012 2:51pm GMT
Print | Single Page
[-] Text [+]
LONDON (Reuters) - Cocoa purchases declared to Ghana's Cocobod reached 681,000 tonnes by January 26 since the start of the 2011/2012 harvest season on October 14 as weekly output stabilises ahead of an expected decline.
The figures, which covered the first 15 weeks of the 2011/12 main crop, were up 5.8 percent over the 643,652 tonnes registered at the same stage last season, according to the data seen by Reuters.
Ghana, world no.2 cocoa producer after Ivory Coast, hopes to buy up to 900,000 tonnes in the current crop year which ends in September.
Purchases for the fifteenth week ended January 26 were 21,668 tonnes, down from 25,583 tonnes the week before, compared to 17,896 tonnes in the corresponding week last year.
Ghana runs a two-cycle cocoa year consisting 33-week main crop, followed by eleven weeks of light crop harvest, which is mainly sold to local grinding firms.
Cocobod projected that weekly output would drop at the end of February, before picking up towards the end of the season.
The country produced a record of more than one million tonnes last year.
