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Swollen shoot disease, slump in cashew prices hurt Ivory Coast badly

The economy of Ivory Coast, one of the world’s biggest exporters of cocoa and cashew nuts, is currently hurting from a combined problem of crop diseases and falling global prices

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The economy of Ivory Coast, one of the world’s biggest exporters of cocoa and cashew nuts, is currently hurting from a combined problem of crop diseases and falling global prices.

Monitored reports say swollen shoot disease is worsening in the heart of Ivory Coast’s cocoa belt with some plantations seeing a significant drop in production, farmers and exporters said on Tuesday.

The viral disease, which typically kills trees within a few years, first appeared a few years ago in southern and western Ivory Coast but is now causing serious damage to crops.

Ivory Coast is the world’s top cocoa grower with annual production reaching 2 million tonnes last season. About 60 percent of that comes from the south and west.

Meanwhile, Cashew nut farmers and exporters in Ivory Coast are seeing a slump in sales as Vietnamese exporters try to get out of contracts following a drop in world prices, an official said on Tuesday.

Ivory Coast is the world’s top cashew nut producer with output of 770,000 tonnes expected this year. Exporters in Vietnam, which has a major cashew processing industry, buy 70 percent of that production.

Read Also: Kenya hopes to fight wastage with new policy

International prices for cashews have dropped by nearly half since March after consumers in the United States and Saudi Arabia objected to high prices. In response, exporters want to pay less than the state-imposed price for this season.

“The contracts that the exporters signed have been called into question,” Adama Coulibaly, the general director of Ivory Coast’s cotton and cashew council, told Reuters. “The Vietnamese processors have seen their margin erode.”

Coulibaly said Ivorian authorities were in discussions with the Vietnamese exporters to insist that they respect the contracts signed in February at the beginning of the cashew-growing season.

According to farmers and exporters, between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes of cashew nuts have not been sold because exporters have not been willing to buy at the fixed price.

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Kenya, Uganda settle oil import dispute

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In an effort to patch things up between the two neighbours, Kenya will permit Uganda’s landlocked state oil company to import petroleum products through its port of Mombasa, the country’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

After decades of receiving their cargo through affiliated firms in Kenya, Uganda has been looking for alternative ways to import petroleum products, including through a port in Tanzania. According to Solomon Muyita, a spokesman for Uganda’s ministry of minerals and energy, the first shipment under the new arrangement is scheduled for May.

“Kenya has agreed to give us a licence, UNOC (Uganda National Oil Company) is now free to import through Mombasa,” he said.

According to reports, UNOC would use the Kenya Pipeline Company to transport the goods, so Kenya would still profit from the agreement, according to Kenyan Energy Minister Davis Chirchir.

In 2022, Uganda imported petroleum products valued at $1.6 billion, the majority of which came from the Gulf. Kenya serves as the import gateway for about 90% of the goods.

It declared in November that it would transfer all exclusive petroleum product supply rights to a division of the international energy trader Vitol, which would subsequently supply UNOC.

According to what the government said at the time, using Kenyan companies to import oil had “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities” whereby Ugandan retail companies were viewed as secondary whenever there were supply disruptions changing retail prices.

The two African nations that make up the Great Lakes are partners in a variety of fields, including trade, infrastructure, energy, education, agriculture, and military security.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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