Fighting reported in cocoa zone

Ivorian military sources told IRIN on Tuesday that government forces retook the west-central town of Daloa 48 hours after it was captured by insurgents. However, there were reports later on Tuesday that fighting continued around the town, located about 350 km northwest of Abidjan. Daloa had been the third large town to fall to insurgents who have been occupying the central town of Bouake and Korhogo in the north since September. The rebels took over Bouake and much of the north after an aborted attempt to overthrow the government on 19 September. They moved southward, occupying Daloa on Sunday. The army launched an offensive on the town on Monday. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which failed to broker a cease-fire two weeks ago, sent a second delegation to Abidjan late last week to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. However, the rebels overran Daloa while the delegation, led by Senegalese Foreign Minister Cheick Tidiane Gadio, was in Bouake for talks with them. On Monday they announced that they were suspending participation in the talks, saying that Angolan troops had been deployed to fight alongside the national army. "We refuse all discussions until the Angolans, if they are here, pull out," Reuters news agency quoted rebel commander Tuo Fozie as saying in Bouake on Monday. President Laurent Gbagbo said in a nation-wide address on Monday that the army had received new military equipment. "At the beginning of the attack against us, at the beginning of this dirty war that was imposed on us, I ordered a quantity of equipment that our army was lacking," Gbagbo said during a televised interview carried by state-run Radio Television Ivoirienne. "This equipment started arriving three days ago." The conflict has uprooted thousands of Ivorians and other West Africans living and working in the country. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that up to 200,000 people from Bouake and its environs were now displaced and are in need of humanitarian assistance. The World Food Programme announced, also on Tuesday, that it airlifted high-energy biscuits to Burkina Faso to assist migrant workers who had fled the unrest in Cote d'Ivoire. It said it had also sent biscuits from neighbouring Guinea to the Ivorian capital, Yamoussoukro, for thousands of internally displaced persons. The town has become a transit point for people fleeing Bouake and Korhogo in the north. In related news, the fighting in Daloa, which is located in the country's most-productive cocoa zone, has pushed global cocoa prices further up. News reports said that the price of cocoa soared to a 16-year high, topping US $2,300 a ton on Monday on international commodity markets. Cote d'Ivoire is the world's leading producer of cocoa.