By Peter Murphy ABOISSO, Ivory Coast, Nov 17 (Reuters) - When a mob of angry villagers came for them with clubs and machetes, the police officers chose the safest option: they hid in the woods. The attack last week on a checkpoint near Ivory Coast's border demonstrates the challenge the top cocoa grower faces in curbing smuggling of its beans to take advantage of higher, state-fixed prices in neighbouring Ghana, the No. 2 grower. Villagers, some with the 12-bore shotguns they use to hunt small birds and small animals in the bush, arrived aboard two pick-up trucks at the check point, Police Commissioner Lambert Sery Megbagnon told Reuters in nearby Aboisso late on Thursday. "Someone came to tell the officers that there was a crowd of 50 or 60 people coming with wooden clubs and machetes. The officers went to hide in the woods and the villagers came and smashed everything and burned the checkpoint down," he said. "We have informed the prosecutor and there will be an investigation. We will hand the files to the justice system." The outpost, in the village of Diby, had been set up on a dirt road used by smugglers as a discreet route to Ghana. But the police presence angered some growers, frustrating their plans to sell their beans illegally to Ghanaian buyers. USED TO BE VICE VERSA Ghanaian cocoa used to be smuggled to Ivory Coast when it too paid a higher, fixed rate to farmers for beans but the tide turned when guaranteed prices were abolished in liberalisation of the sector under foreign donor pressure in 2000. Today Ivorian farmers receive around 350 CFA francs ($0.68) -- barely two thirds of the price paid in Ghana, which raised its official farm gate price last month to 9.15 million Ghanaian cedis a tonne, or $0.99 per kg. Some exporters say Ghanaian beans are generally higher quality. "Almost all the cocoa from hereabouts is sold in Ghana. Here, when there is too much available you get 325 CFA per kg. On the other side you get at least 400 CFA," said Bernard Ane, a cocoa farmer near the town of Abengourou, north of Aboisso. "But the gendarmes (paramilitary police) are complicit. They let cocoa through for a little something. Some gendarmes are even selling cocoa. They buy it to sell on the other side of the border at a profit," he said. SECURITY FORCES VERSUS MARKET FORCES Surveillance committees made up of members of the security forces, local authorities and farmer-owned cooperatives have stopped some cocoa reaching the border, but some members say smugglers, sometimes armed, are more and more aggressive. "People are hostile to us trying to prevent them selling their cocoa in Ghana. They can earn more there so they wonder why we're stopping them from doing it," Megbagnon said. Losing tax revenues to smuggling hurts the Ivorian economy, which has also been severely undermined by a 2002-03 civil war. "It's our duty to protect the economy of our country," Megbagnon said, turning a page in a spiral bound legal text outlining the Sept. 1994 outlawing smuggling of farm produce. Anyone convicted faces heavy fines and up to 10 years in jail. In the yard of the police barracks lay a mud-splattered blue pickup truck with no licence plates which police had intercepted on the road to Ghana loaded with 56 sacks of cocoa. The driver denies he intended to smuggle the load but police impounded the truck pending an investigation, Megbagnon said. The cocoa was sold and some of the proceeds given to those who informed on the smugglers, as an incentive for locals to shop smugglers, he said. "The difficulty is with the farmers themselves. Cocoa prices are higher in Ghana so they want to sell it there, and they find every possible way around anything we do to stop them," he said. (Additional reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly)
