On 4 May, the National Dominican Cacao Plantations Agroforestry Rehabilitation Plan (PRACAO) was presented to Señor Eulalio Ramírez, Deputy Minister of Production and Marketing at the Ministry of Agriculture. PRACAO was devised and set up by the Cacao Forest project in the Dominican Republic (PCF-RD II).

 

The presentation took place at the Comisión Nacional del Cacao. Cacao Forest project coordinator Sebastián Cárdenas explained the following aspect to the participants:

  • the context of the Dominican cocoa industry, based on the data collected by the project;
  • the different phases and components of the PRACAO initiative.

 

At the meeting it was stressed that rehabilitation of the country’s existing cacao plantations is urgently required given

– the advanced age of most plantations,

– the necessity to increase the economic returns of small cocoa producers,

– the need to improve the current genetic stock of the cacao plantations,

– the importance of mitigating the impact of any future Monilinia blight outbreak in the Dominican Republic.

 

 

 

Laurie Chovet, project officer for the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), which is funding half of the Cacao Forest project, again expressed AFD’s interest in supporting PRACAO in the form of a possible loan to the Dominican government. In this respect, the Ministry of Agriculture has a key role to play by including PRACAO in the Dominican government’s budget in 2024.

 

The Deputy Minister, Eulalio Ramírez, offered to organise a meeting with the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Development (MEPyD) to address all of these issues and incorporate the programme into the government’s cocoa industry renewal initiative, which was recently launched by the Ministry of Agriculture through the Comisión Nacional del Cacao (CNC).

 

Victor Hidalgo, director of the CNC, said that PRACAO was very useful to the Dominican private cocoa export sector, stressing that this programme had been devised to incorporate 10 entities from both the public and private sectors.

 

The following organisations were represented at the meeting: the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), the Dominican Republic Cocoa Foundation (DRCF), the Ministry of Agriculture’s Department of Cocoa, the cooperative and leading exporter CONACADO, the Dominican Organic Growers Foundation (FUNDOPO) and the Comisión Nacional del Cacao (CNC).