Cost Benefit Analysis of Certified Cocoa Production in Ondo State, Nigeria

The paper is on Cost-Benefit Analysis of certified cocoa production in Ondo state.Data were collected by purposively choosing three local government areas noted for certified cocoa production, namely Idanre, Ile oluji and Owo local government areas of the state. Simple random sampling technique was used to select thirty certified cocoa farmers from Idanre, twenty certified cocoa farmers from Ile oluji/Oke-igbo and ten certified cocoa farmers from Owo local government areas of the state making a total of sixty respondents in all. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics, profitability analysis, gross margin analysis and cost benefit analysis.The profitability analysis, gross margin analysis and cost benefit analysis showed that conventional cocoa production is profitable with profit, GM, NPV, BCR and IRR of N5,713,329 N11,062,329 N428,306.3, 1.04 and 31.31% respectively. It was also revealed that certified cocoa production was more profitable than conventional cocoa production having profit, GM, NPV, BCR and IRR of N14, 889,098, N20,238,090, N5,253,237,1.45 and 59.64% respectively.The major identified constraints in certified cocoa production were: inadequate resources to finance their farming operations and unavailability of inputs. Recommendations from the study include among others: provision of inputs at subsidized rate to the farmers at reasonable and affordable interest rates, need for effective monitoring and evaluation team for certified cocoa farmers in order to reduce the share of certified cocoa sold into conventional channel, more awareness and sensitization programmes on cocoa certification so that more farmers and non-governmental organizations will be involved.