Nigerian Cocoa Output to Be Boosted by Government Farm Program

Cocoa output in Nigeria, the world's fifth-biggest producer of the chocolate ingredient, will be boosted within two years by harvests from new and rehabilitated farms, growers and government officials said.

Farmers in southwestern Ondo state, which accounts for more than 40 percent of Nigerian production, have received seedlings free from the state government to replant old plantations and bring new farms into cultivation, Bamidele Olamigoke, a cocoa farmer and secretary of the Ondo Cocoa Farmers Association, said in an interview today.

``The government helped me cut down the old trees I inherited from my father and replant them with new seedlings three years ago,'' Olamigoke said in Akure, 400 kilometers (249 miles) north of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos. ``I'm already seeing the results as I'm harvesting more than before.''