Ghana sets 2016-17 season farmgate cocoa price at $1,914/T

TEPA, Ghana (Reuters) - Ghana will pay cocoa farmers 7,600 cedis ($1,914) per tonne of beans during the 2016-17 season, 11.8 percent higher than last season, deputy finance minister Cassiel Ato Forson said on Saturday as he announced the start of the new season. The new price works out at 475 cedis per 64-kg bag, the main unit in which Ghana's hundreds of thousands of cocoa farmers sell the crop for export. Cocoa regulator Cocobod is targeting production of 850,000-900,000 tonnes this season. Ghana is the world's second biggest cocoa producer behind neighbouring Ivory Coast and cocoa is Ghana's most important export crop, earning vital foreign exchange for a country where economic growth has slowed sharply since 2014. "This change (the new price) is higher than ... our major competitor, our neighbour Ivory Coast," Forson told a gathering of traditional chiefs and cocoa farmers in the town of Tepa in the Ashanti region. The cocoa year runs from October to September and the season that has just ended was hampered by an unusually long dry season and fell short of the government's target of 850,000. A final production figure has yet to be announced though it will be than the disappointing output of 740,000 tonnes in the previous season, officials said. ($1 = 3.9715 Ghana cedis) (Reporting by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; additional reporting by Kwasi Kpodo in Accra; editing by David Clarke)