10:30 a.m. Apr 30, 1999 Eastern ACCRA, April 30 (Reuters) - Ghana is to partly liberalise cocoa exports by October 2000 and allow private companies to export up to 30 percent of their domestic purchases, according to Finance Minister Kwame Peprah.

``The strategy provides for licensed buying companies, including the (state) Produce Buying Company, to be allowed to export up to 30 percent of their domestic purchases, beginning in the crop year 2000-2001,'' Peprah told the Ghana News Agency.

Following extensive talks with cocoa sector experts and major players, Ghana has developed a cocoa sector development strategy which will be implemented by a steering committee, Peprah said in the interview published on Wednesday.

Ghana has long resisted foreign donor pressure to liberalise its cocoa sector. In 1992, the country allowed private buyers (licensed buying companies) to compete with Cocobod's buying agency, the Produce Buying Company.

The government continued fixing the farmgate price and Cocobod, the state cocoa marketing board, kept its monopoly on exports.

Peprah said the government had set dates and modalities to increase the farmgate price to at least 60 percent of the free-on-board price at the start of the 1998/99 mid-crop, which runs from May to September 1999.

Six months ago, at the opening of the current season, on October 23, 1998, Ghana put the farmgate reference price at 2,250,000 cedis ($968) per tonne.

Since October, the cedi has been relatively stable, and by early March farmers were receiving the equivalent of $937 per tonne.

But Ghana trade sources said this was already equivalent to 75.6 percent of the current fob price due to the slump in world cocoa prices.

Ghana's 1998/99 cocoa crop is expected to be 360,000-370,000 tonnes, down by 30,000-40,000 tonnes on the 1997/98 crop, due to El Nino-related drought last year.