Former Energy Minister and Member of Parliament Dr Kwabena Donkor has challenged the growing narrative that Ghana’s cocoa farmers have been shortchanged under the current administration’s pricing reforms, arguing that the debate cannot be resolved through political sentiment and must instead be anchored in data, specifically in the percentage of the Free on Board (FOB) export price that farmers actually receive.
Speaking in an interview with The High Street Journal, Dr Donkor said that by the most relevant metric, the government’s position represents an improvement rather than a retreat. Ghana’s Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC), chaired by Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, announced on February 12 that cocoa farmers will receive 90 per cent of the achieved gross FOB price of USD4,200 per tonne for the remainder of the 2025/2026 crop season, translating to a producer price of Ghana cedis (GH¢) 41,392 per tonne and GH¢2,587 per 64-kilogram bag. Under the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration in 2024-25, farmers received 63.9 per cent of FOB, a figure that was lower than the statutory minimum of 70 per cent despite more favourable global cocoa prices at the time.
Dr Donkor said that if the FOB percentage paid to farmers has not declined, allegations of unfairness require a more careful evidential basis than political commentary alone can provide. He said the central question for any government committed to farmer welfare is not the nominal cedi amount per bag but the percentage of world market value that flows to the producer.
The exchange rate dimension complicates the picture. The cedi has strengthened significantly since early 2025, which means that each dollar of FOB revenue converts into fewer cedis than in previous years. Critics have used this to argue that farmers are worse off despite the higher FOB percentage. Dr Donkor acknowledged the mathematical reality but challenged the economic interpretation, arguing that purchasing power, not nominal cedi receipts, is the correct measure of farmer welfare. A farmer who receives fewer cedis for a bag but whose cedis buy more goods than in the previous year has not necessarily been made poorer.
He described this as fundamentally a communication challenge for government, noting that explaining the relationship between FOB percentages, exchange rate movements and real purchasing power to hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers requires both technical clarity and political courage.
The Ghana Chapter of the Cocoa Farmers Alliance of Africa has publicly endorsed the government’s approach, rejecting opposition calls for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout and commending the administration for pursuing home-grown solutions, while noting that farmers themselves recognise the obligation to price competitively. However, the Ghana Cooperative Cocoa Farmers and Marketing Association, representing approximately 395,000 members, has called on government to settle outstanding arrears for beans already delivered at the previous official price before the pricing restructuring takes full effect.
Dr Donkor used his analysis to revisit a broader structural debate about how Ghana manages cocoa price volatility. He recalled that in the 1960s and 1970s Ghana operated a price stabilisation mechanism under which a portion of FOB revenue was set aside in years of high global prices and drawn down as a buffer when prices fell. The system provided farmers with a degree of income predictability that the current direct FOB-linked model does not replicate.
The global price collapse from USD7,200 per tonne in August 2025 to approximately USD4,100 per tonne by February 2026 illustrates precisely the volatility that a stabilisation mechanism would be designed to cushion. Under the current FOB-linked model, farmers bear the full impact of international market movements in both directions. When world prices rise, as they did dramatically in 2023 and 2024, farmers benefit. When they fall, as they have sharply in the current season, farmers absorb the loss directly.
Dr Donkor said he supports the concept of a modern buffer or stabilisation fund but raised substantive governance questions that he said must be resolved before any such mechanism can be trusted to serve its intended purpose. Who manages the fund? Is it independently invested in assets that protect its value between drawdown periods? Does it sit within the central treasury, and if so, how is it protected from being absorbed into recurrent expenditure pressures in lean fiscal years?
He noted that Ghana’s history with earmarked funds and fiscal ring-fencing arrangements is mixed, and that without strong institutional architecture and genuinely independent oversight, a stabilisation fund risks becoming a fiscal plug that finance ministries access opportunistically rather than a protected reserve for farmers.
Government has announced plans to present a new Cocoa Board Bill to Parliament that will introduce automatic producer price adjustments linked to world market movements and exchange rates, with a statutory guarantee that farmers receive a minimum of 70 per cent of gross FOB. COCOBOD has also been directed to convert GH¢5.8 billion in legacy debt owed to the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana into equity to restore the board’s financial footing.
A new domestic cocoa bond financing system will replace the collapsed syndicated foreign currency loan model from the 2026-27 season, with bond proceeds to be repaid within each crop year and all beans freed from collateralisation obligations that previously prevented allocation to domestic processors.
Dr Donkor’s central argument is that Ghana’s cocoa debate must rise above partisan framing and engage seriously with the policy architecture question: what percentage of FOB should farmers receive, how should that percentage be set and enforced by law, and what buffer mechanisms should protect farmers from the volatility that a transparent market-linked system inevitably exposes them to? Without answers to those questions, the pricing controversy will recur at every commodity cycle, generating more heat than progress.
