Cocoa bean or simply Cocoa is a plant product from which varieties of chocolate are produced. It mainly grows in the tropical areas, and brings to mankind adequate benefits both medicinal and for food production.
Without Cocoa, most of the delicious beverages the world enjoy today, wouldn’t have been possible. Sweet chocolate is produced by adding sugar to cocoa powder. And most food and beverage companies rely heavily on Cocoa to make their products.
In medicine, it is used to treat complications of diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol levels, chronic fatigue syndrome, and constipation but getting the cocoa in sufficient amount for good production of the products, and medicine is not often very easy as it’s not readily available in most Western countries thus the producer of these essential products are left with no other option to produce little for its high demand, invariably making these products a bit more expensive than they ordinarily wouldn’t have been if there were enough supply of the raw materials.
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However, there seems to be solution now for this challenging situation looking at the rate at which Cocoa is being produced in Nigeria precisely in Cross Rivers state, a riverine area in the southern part of the country. It’s as if the reverse is the case in this part of the world, a farmer made Africa Daily News, to understand.
“We experience good harvest here but the challenge we often have to contend with is the market for the produce. For instance, we hardly get enough buyers.” A farmer who simply wished to be addressed as Mr Chris explained to Africa Daily News, in his farm.
“We actually produce quite enough for exportation but just as I earlier said, we don’t have that kind of patronage yet. We are hoping someday that foreign investors or partners will get involved with us, and we’ll do it in bigger and better ways,” Mr Chris who manages a medium scale cocoa farm further explained.
