Trouble in Osun’s rusting ‘goldmine’

Trouble in Osun’s rusting ‘goldmine’

Farmers in high cocoa-producing Eti-Oni community lament rip-off by merchants

Eti-Oni, a cosmopolitan community in Osun State, is populated by farmers from different parts of Nigeria, all bonded by cocoa, the golden seed. But while produce merchants and end users of cocoa are smiling to the bank, the farmers in this Osun community are lamenting the absence of the basic amenities their activities require to flourish.

After peaking at about 3,122 U.S. dollars per metric ton in mid-2016, the monthly price of cocoa has fluctuated between 1,900 U.S. dollars and 2,700 U.S. dollars per metric ton.

Globally, it is estimated that over 4.5 million tonnes of cocoa beans are consumed yearly, with prospects of the figure increasing; a fact acknowledged by the World Cocoa Foundation. But the price of cocoa has been fluctuating, causing farmers to record heavy losses in West Africa.

Today, a tonne of cocoa sells for between N1,150, 000 and N1,300, 000 depending on the purchase location. But the farmers at Eti-Oni sell theirs far below the standard price due to forces they have no control over.

Besides, the farmers in this community are literally cut off from the rest of the city as a result of bad roads. The medical facility available in the community is not commensurate with the wealth being generated from it. But for the annual cocoa festival which draws attention to the community, it would qualify for a ghost town.

While virtually all the ethnic groups in Nigeria are represented in the community, this has not attracted any meaningful attention from the government.

When our correspondent visited the community, the number of youths was few. “The absence of basic infrastructure is discouraging most of them from staying in Eti-Oni.

“If you were not a farmer, what would you be doing here? How many of them are interested in cocoa farming?

“Until government provides basic facilities, the youth will continue to run away from here,” one of the farmers lamented.

Indeed, there are fears in some quarters that if nothing is done urgently, it could mean the end of the cocoa community that has been in existence for more than 127 years.

The roads leading to the community are rough and bumpy, and whenever it rains, it is always a big challenge to get into the community.

 “It used to be worse before now as there was no way you could access the community. An improvement came during the 2017 Cocoa Festival when kabiyesi (the traditional ruler) facilitated the grading of the road through the state festival,” a commercial motorcyclist told our correspondent during a visit to the community.

But it is not only the Eti-Oni farmers that are losing money from the neglect it suffers. The state government, it was gathered, is also losing a lot of revenue that would have accrued from it.

Citing 2022 as an instance, the traditional ruler of Eti-Oni, Oba Dokun Thompson, said: “In 2022, Osun State cocoa production figure was less than 25,000 tons, the graded figure is less than 50 percent of that. This is a result of good access to Osun State and our proximity to Ondo State.

“So, a good number of the aggregators for the farmers along that belt will rather take their produce to Ondo State for grading, which gives Ondo State, not Osun, the tax revenues.

“At the Federal level, I can safely say that the country loses an estimated $2 billion for the lack of commitment to the cocoa industry.”

Lamenting the plights of cocoa farmers in Eti-Oni, one of the leading female farmers in the community, Mrs Taiwo Adenike, said she ventured into the cocoa business by happenstance.

According to her, she was a trader in Zamfara State when a crisis occurred and she had to relocate to Eti-Oni and had been in the cocoa business for more than 25 years. She also deals in palm oil, bitter kola, kola nuts and other tree crops.

She recalled that with her earnings from cocoa, she had been able to send all her children to different institutions. She said, however, that the business is not without its own challenges. She is particularly not happy that cocoa farmers are at the mercy of merchants.

According to her, the produce dealers dictate how much they pay for the products. But while this could be explained away in terms of demand and supply factors, the total abandonment of the community by the government is worrisome.

She said: “The community lacks some equipment that could make farming easy. Getting good insecticide for cocoa is like the camel passing through the eye of a needle.

“The buyers determine how much they want to pay for our cocoa. We don’t have any other option but to accede to the price because there is a glut.

“As long as it is the same price in other villages, we would agree to sell on their terms. Because of the way we preserve our cocoa at Eti-Oni, it is always better in quality and weight.”

She called on the government to make its presence felt at Eti-Oni, the birthplace of cocoa.  “We are not benefitting anything from the government in Eti-Oni. We are only profiting from our sweat.

“We are hereby calling on the government to help the cocoa farmers in Eti-Oni, especially the women cocoa farmers.

“Our roads are bad. There is no clinic here. If you have any medical challenge, you have to run to the main town to seek medical attention.”

Another female cocoa farmer, Madam Fowowe  Yinka, is also not happy with the neglect of the community by the government. According to her, the state government had made promises in the past to uplift life in the community, but that is yet to come to fruition.

She is also not happy that while the rest of Nigerians enjoy uninterrupted telecommunication services, MTN, the largest service provider, is not functioning well in Eti-Oni. According to her, subscribers using MTN in the community are finding it difficult to reach out to others.

“Let the government know that the services of the MTN here are epileptic,” she said.According to Fowowe, experts from outside occasionally come to the community to organise workshops for the farmers, teaching them how to manage their farms and get good yields. But she is not happy that farmers do not have control over the price of their products as they are always at the mercy of produce merchants.

She said: “It is the produce merchants that determine how much we sell to them. It is the amount they want to pay that we take from them.

“It is not only that. At times when we need money to pay school fees, we approach these produce merchants. After getting cocoa from us, they deduct their money and they give us the remaining.”

To worsen the plight of farmers, while cocoa farmers are based in Eti-Oni, their family members are scattered in different towns because of lack of basic amenities.

“My family members are not in Eti-Oni, they live in Ilesha where they are schooling,” Fowowe said.

She said her children cannot school in Eti-Oni because of the low standard of the community school. “My children are attending private schools in the main town,” she said.

The absence of good clinics is also a source of worry for the farmers. Most of them have to go to Ilesha to get good medical care whenever they are indisposed. “There is a small clinic at Eti-Oni with one nurse who attends to us,” she said.

She is therefore calling on the government to help the community by providing things that would make life better.

“I was happy when I heard the news that they were going to reopen the secondary school in the community which was shut many years ago. That would put paid to the two pots we have been keeping; one in Eti-Oni and another in Ilesha. We would be able to enrol our children in this school and would have peace.

“That our hospital is too small. It is just a small dispensary. Let it be stocked with drugs. The primary school too, if they do it very well, we would bring our children back to Eti-Oni. They would be with us and we would be able to monitor them.”

Although the community is plagued with challenges, the annual Cocoa Festival has been a source of relief for residents. Mrs Fowowe told our correspondent that the community is always a beehive of activities when people come from all over the world to celebrate the festival.

She commended the traditional ruler of the community for the initiative. “During the festival, the economy of the community always picks up,” she said.

But for fate, Tunde Olowe would probably not have thought about cocoa farming, though as a student, he had been frequenting the community to help his father on his cocoa farm.

Narrating how he started cocoa farming, he said. “It was when I lost my father in 2001 that I decided to go into cocoa farming. I just resolved to stay in Eti-Oni to continue to manage my father’s farm.”

 He also said the fear of unemployment after graduation made him continue as a cocoa farmer.

“Cocoa business is sweet with lots of profits if the farm is well maintained,” he said, adding however that the business has its own flip side.”

In trying to combat the challenges, Oba Thompson built a dryer for the community, “but because some of us are not used to the way they do cocoa in the developed world, the covered fermented building, where we were supposed to be drying our cocoa, collapsed because we were not use to it.”

He also acknowledged that the produce merchants determine the price of cocoa in the community.

Oba Thompson had made efforts to stop this by discouraging the farmers from selling their commodities at very cheap prices, but during the period, farmers did not have the cash they rushed to the produce buyers for support in the form of soft loans. “By the time the cocoa dries, we sell them to produce buyers and they make more money than we farmers.”

Olowe called on the government to help the farmers by making chemicals and funds available for them. Since the community is the source of raw materials for the end users of cocoa, Olowe also said it makes more economic sense for them to come and site their factories in Eti-Oni. To him, it is going to be a win-win for both the farmers and the end users who would be able to monitor the cocoa from inception while the farmers would make more money.

Just like other residents of the community, none of his children goes to school in Eti- Oni. “There is no standard school here,” he said.

The only secondary school in the cocoa community, The Nation gathered, was closed down in 1998 due to what a source described as politics. The fear now is that since most farmers have sent their children out of the community, cocoa farming, which has been in existence since 1896, will one day come to an end.

Olowe, however, disagreed with this position, saying that the community will find a way around it. “I have a brother abroad. I still send his own share of the proceeds of cocoa to him. If eventually I grow old and pass on, somebody will still be here giving my children returns.”

He lamented the state of the road leading to the community. It was gathered that the state government has started the construction of a major road leading to Eti-Oni, and in no time, the cocoa community will also benefit from the project.”If the government can maintain that and make sure it reaches Eti-Oni, the farmers here will benefit from it,” Olowe said, noting that bad roads and lack of good hospitals had led to the death of many in the past.

Lamenting, Olowe said: “In 2019, the traditional ruler of Eti-Oni built a provisional health centre. Then he brought the deputy governor, in order for the government to assist us with the road and the hospital. I don’t know what happened that they could not do it.”

He appealed to the government to renovate the health centre at Eti-Oni, bring in doctors and equip the clinic.

Clamour for Cocoa Producing Communities Development Company

With huge cocoa coming from the rural community, one would have thought that the government would replicate what is being done for oil-producing companies for cocoa- producing communities in Nigeria, but Oba Thompson said it is doubtful.

According to him, going that route would probably not change anything because if an agency like the Niger Delta Development Commission had done very well, there would not be cries of neglect by the oil-producing communities in the region.

He said before a similar organisation can be achieved, it means almost total regulation of the cocoa sector, and from the experience in Ivory Coast or Ghana, the cocoa-producing communities and cocoa farmers are worse off.

Oba Thompson said: “The regulation framework there and the regime were created to benefit only the multinationals, and that has been the case since the 1950s after the farmers’ revolt in the 1940s in Ghana and Nigeria.

 “What the Nigerian cocoa industry requires is not regulation in the form practised in West Africa but a commercialization structure that will do Three things – work towards building the culture for local consumption to unlock the value locally, encourage investment and also incentivise increased production capacity with capacity development and proper quality monitoring and control in place, and create easy access to investments in the value add for industrial and finished products with a ready market that we are not at their mercy.”

Like every other person that had been to the community, Oba Thompson also lamented the state of roads in the community.

He said there are two routes into Eti-Oni, the main one which is a Federal road that links Osogbo – Ilesa – Eti-Oni – Oke-Igbo and Ondo both in Ondo States and was last paved in 1984.

“Out of the 23km from Ilesa to Eti-Oni, only about 5km of the road was paved about nine years ago and the rest is left in a state of disrepair with gullies and literally unmotorable.

“The other route which goes from Iwara – Igangan – Eti-Oni had part of it paved with about 9km to Eti-Oni left also in a sorry state and a daunting task to drive on with vehicles having to go for repairs each time they pass the road.”

In addition to bad roads, the Oba said, the community also lacks all the social amenities you can think of. “From housing to the state of the schools or the health centres, Eti-Oni is not left out in this misery that faces the communities,” he said.

Not waiting for the government, the traditional rulers with other organisations have come up with a development plan that can transform the community into a sustainable model smart town.

 “What we need to achieve this is through an economic model that will fund those development activities. We have been working to create awareness, look for investments and identify partners that can collaborate with us for this purpose. Though things are tough, we are on course,” the traditional ruler said.

In getting cocoa to buyers, Oba Thompson said that in an extractive industry, the exporters or wholesalers have their buying agents or aggregators and they buy at the lowest possible price from the farmers, which always leaves the farmers with the short end.

He said the merchants are the ones who move the produce from the farms to warehouses outside the region, in which case the farmers will only collect what they are offered.

He said: “I cannot say whether they get value for their work or not. But if they had reason to travel for some of the social amenities you mentioned earlier, then we can say the value is already being lost.

“On the other hand, if the social amenities were close by within the community, then we can say their requirement for more cash will be reduced as their cost of providing or accessing a reasonable level of the decent living standard will be heavily reduced.”

Unfortunately, the challenges farmers face, according to Oba Thompson, are compounded by the fact that Eti-Oni being situated along the rainforest belt, is tucked in and quite remote, which leaves the farmers to almost think they have been abandoned and this definitely has a very negative effect on their psyche.

“The other challenges which have to do with lack of social amenities also fuel rural to urban migration with the average age of a farmer almost at 45 to 50 years when they are already getting weak with the younger generation not interested because they see only poverty, and this should not be the case.

“So cocoa farming is fast becoming a retirement vocation or something to return to after all has failed in the search for a better life in an urban community,” the monarch lamented.

He described as sad and unusable, the state health facility in the community.

Not all a tale of woes

However, the story of the community is not all about woes. While many communities are living in fear, life at Eti-Oni is peaceful.

“In truth, we are in a safe and fine environment that would be a beautiful place for those who love nature, because we are actually an agroforest.

“We have natural and wildly growing vegetables and even food crops and fruits.

“River Oni provides fish. So eating healthy, which can be expensive in the Western world, is available to us at a minimal cost. The people are generally easy-going, very pleasant, and hopeful that things will eventually turn around for the good of all,” said the monarch.

In his own little way, the monarch has made efforts to develop the community. He has succeeded in creating awareness and letting people know what the community is all about.

“This we did through defining ourselves for the purpose of creating value. We have our land, we have our people and we have cocoa.

“We created the Cocoa Festival which is now in its 9th edition for this purpose, and since we started the Cocoa Festival, we have also added several others – Eko Chocolate Show in its 4th edition, Nigerian Cocoa Awards, Royal Cocoa International Film Festivals, Royal Cocoa Festival Dinner London.

“We have also showcased Eti-Oni in different parts of the world, speaking and participating in several conferences on cocoa and chocolate.

 “Secondly, we put together our development plan, defining where we are, where we want to be, and how to get there, and at the same time identifying what we need and who can help us achieve our objectives, which as I said earlier, is to transform into a sustainable model smart town.

“Ten years ago, if you asked anyone about Eti-Oni, no one would be able to say anything. But today, most will tell you about our history in cocoa being the oldest cocoa community in the country producing cocoa since 1896.

Funding has been hampering the plan to develop the community, but the Oba is optimistic that things will begin to take shape soon.

“Also, do not forget that we can say we lost almost two years to the COVID-19 pandemic and the world is yet to fully recover from it,” he said.

He is therefore calling on companies and industries to come to Eti-Oni in order to take advantage of the serene and beautiful environment which offers several produce and resources with opportunities for the establishment of several small-size factories.

“Although we have a public power supply, part of our development plan includes the establishment of a renewable energy plan as part of our strategy to protect our environment.

“The main strategy for our smart town is to deploy the internet for things that can create a living lab concept for companies who are willing to partner and ready to deploy and showcase how their solutions work,” he said.