Cocoa smuggling costs Ghana over $1bn in three years

• Posted on November 17, 2025November 17, 2025
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Jake Kudjo Samahar, Director of Special Services at COCOBOD, has revealed that Ghana lost a total of 7,128.13 tonnes of cocoa to smuggling between the 2020 and 2025 crop years in the Volta and Oti regions.

According to him, cocoa production in these regions has drastically declined over the period.

“The tonnage recorded for 2020/21 crop year was 7,215.19, which reduced to 5,656.25 in 2021/22, further downward to 874.31 in the 2022/23 crop year, while 2023/24 recorded 468.75 tonnes with 2024/25 crop year recording 87.06 tonnes,” he stated.

“We are losing a lot of revenue because if you look at within three years from 2022-2025, Ghana has lost almost $1.1 billion through cocoa smuggling into neighbouring Togo and Côte d’Ivoire,” he said.

The disclosure came during a working visit by COCOBOD board members to the Oti and Volta regions, where they interacted with stakeholders in the cocoa sector.

Security personnel in both regions have been identified as key actors in the growing smuggling trade, a development that COCOBOD says is exacerbating losses and weakening border enforcement.

Mr. Samahar explained that smuggling occurs through both local movements within border communities and transit routes into neighbouring countries, often facilitated by compromised security checkpoints.

“The uniqueness of the smuggling in the Volta region and Oti is that we have two categories of smuggling. The first is the local smuggling, where cocoa beans are moved from our farms in the Volta region or Oti region into Togo. And then we have the transit ones that move from other regions through the corridors of the eastern corridor down to or into Togo,” he said.

“This means that the security services are not manning their checkpoints. Some of them have compromised themselves very much,” he added.

Mr. Samahar further noted that Ghana lost a total of US$1.1 billion from 2022 to 2025 due to cocoa smuggling to neighbouring Togo and Côte d’Ivoire

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