Eight African leaders are billed to converge in Nigeria's capital Abuja on Thursday for the "All Africa Cocoa Summit" designed to address the challenges of African cocoa producing nations, a senior Nigerian official said here Tuesday.

At a news conference, Nigerian Federal Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Malam Adamu Bello said the presidents of Cameroon, Cote d'Ivore, Gabon, Ghana, Togo, Uganda and Sao Tome and Principe will attend the summit.

According to the minister, part of the agenda for the three-day summit with the theme "Sustainable cocoa economy for Africa" includes articulating strategies for ensuring equilibrium between supply and demand.

"The summit will agree on strategies for maintaining international quality standards, come up with deliberate strategies at targeting the emerging markets and agree on strategies for increased local consumption amongst others," he said.

The agriculture minister added that the summit would also seek to work out improved access and affordability of cocoa production through building better markets, review evidence of cocoa use in African, identify major constraints to the current limited use of cocoa on the continent and proffer solutions to them.

Adamu said 80 percent of the world cocoa export comes from Africa which consumes only about 2 percent of the product, adding that the scenario had affected the pricing with consumers dictating price without recourse to production cost.

The three-day summit is expected to initiate policies that will ensure a permanent answer to the perennial challenges of cocoa producers.

Erelu Olushola Obadan, chairman of the Cocoa Rebirth Committee, said some cocoa producing countries like Brazil and Malaysia had moved beyond exporting the commodity to consuming all their beans.

She, therefore, said that African producing states could not do less, because "we have the population and all we need is the political will and determination."

Source: Xinhua