NIABLE/DUEKOUE, Ivory Coast (Reuters) — Swollen shoot disease is pushing deep into Ivory Coast’s primary cocoa-growing regions despite government efforts to combat it.
The disease could hurt output from the world’s top grower over the long term.
The disease has spread to 12 percent of all Ivorian cocoa farms in the decade since it struck the centre-west growing regions.
“It’s progressing, without a doubt,” said Francois Ruf, an economist with the French agricultural research centre CIRAD.
“It’s already been devastating around Gagnoa, Guitry, Fresco and outside the Tai national park as well,” he said, describing an area that straddles some of Ivory Coast’s most productive cocoa farmland in the southwest.
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The viral disease, first identified in neighbouring Ghana in the 1930s, causes a drastic reduction in yields in the first season following infection and then typically kills trees within a few years.
It has since been found near Issia in the Daloa region, which accounts for a quarter of the Ivorian crop, according to the cocoa marketing board.
An Ivorian agronomist who is involved in the study said 370,000 acres of Ivory Coast’s six million acres of cocoa farms are either threatened or have already been destroyed.
Ivory Coast produces nearly 40 percent of the world’s cocoa.
