OLAM, a licensed buying company (LBC) is supporting cocoa farmers in the Kakum area of the Twifo Praso District in the production of sustainable cocoa.

There are 13 steps a farmer has to follow to achieve a sustainable cocoa produce including waste management, water conservation, wildlife protection, avoidance of child labour, use of protective clothing and waste water management amongst others.

At the moment, OLAM is providing training, cutlasses, monitoring and other support services to help the farmers achieve their target.

These came to light when Messrs Hiroshi Ogata of Confitera Trading Company in Japan and Norinisa Hirota of Fuji Oil also in Japan, who were in the country to trace the source of cocoa beans they have been buying, visited a number of cocoa farms in Kakum area in the Twifo Praso District.

The visitors were conducted round by officials of OLAM including Eric Asare Botwe OLAM’s LBC Head and Deepak Choudhary, Co- ordinator for Western South.

At Twifo Tweapease and Twifo Anthony, the team inspected a total of nine acres of cocoa farm and also interacted with farmers at Twifo Bobi and Twifo Paaso.

Mr. Botwe told the farmers that they stood to benefit a lot should they work hard to produce more cocoa since they would be paid premium on their produce whilst part of the premium would be converted into community projects.

“The amount of investments OLAM would make towards community development would largely depend on the number of cocoa bags the company would purchase from the community,” he said and encouraged the farmers to embrace the new traceability and certified cocoa idea.

Speaking to the press after the inspection, Mr. Ogata said Japan had been buying about 80 percent of their country’s cocoa and so their expectation of the Ghana’s cocoa were higher.

“Japanese are happy with the good quality of cocoa beans from Ghana”, he said, adding that “Ghana’s cocoa beans status have been maintained on the international market because of its high quality’’.