KAMPALA – Uganda’s cocoa production is expected to surge nearly 29% this year from 2024, helped by expanded crop acreage where new trees are starting to come to fruition, a senior agricultural ministry official told Reuters on Friday.
The east African country is better known as Africa’s largest exporter of coffee but it has also been trying to expand its output of other cash crops like cocoa and palm oil.
However, it is still way off catching up to the Ivory Coast and Ghana – the world’s leading cocoa producers. Ivory Coast is expected to export 1.3 million metric tons in the 2025/26 season.
Ugandan is projected to produce 45,000 tons of cocoa this year, up from 35,000, Alex Lwakuba, commissioner for crop production at the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) said.
In recent years, Lwakuba said, the government had “carried out free seedling distribution… and expanded the production of cocoa in new regions.”
New acreage for cocoa crop had been opened up in areas in Uganda’s northwest and eastern regions, he said.
Traditionally most of Uganda’s cocoa was grown in the highlands of the Rwenzori region in the country’s west, near its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Farmers were also responding to high demand for Ugandan cocoa and expanding their crop fields, he said.
“Demand is high and particularly for Uganda because of our method of production. Our cocoa is organic… our cocoa is natural, we don’t use any synthetic agrochemicals.”
Farmers in Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer, typically apply pesticides and anti-fungal treatments to the crop twice a year, in July or August and then again in December or January, in order to boost yields and ensure bean quality.
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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