The World Bank-sponsored liberalisation of the west African country's commodities marketing, which began with this season's coffee crop, has turned their world on its head.

Gone is the reassuring presence of the state-run marketing board, the Caisse de Stabilisation, fondly known as the Caistab, which had protected them from the vagaries of world market prices since 1955 -- five years before independence from France.

The World Bank says that farmers will emerge as the real winners but the accompanying uncertainty has left many feeling anxious -- in some cases angry -- and exposed.

"The first three years after liberalisation will be very difficult, there will even be some trouble," predicted one senior Agriculture Ministry official.

This would stem from friction between farmers and buyers, mainly Lebanese, over farmgate prices, he told Reuters privately.

In countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia,free-market conditions ensure farmers over 85 percent of the free-on-board (pre-shipment) price for cocoa -- compared to around 60 percent in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which retains its marketing board.

But in Ivory Coast, a country where half the population can neither read nor write, old traditions die hard.

For the first time since 1955, when a stabilisation fund was established to compensate farmers if world prices crashed, the government did not set a farmgate price in the 1998/99 coffee marketing season.

Farmgate coffee prices now vary on a daily basis, according to world market price fluctuations. Cocoa prices will do the same next season, which begins in October.

Radio and newspapers carry the day's price for coffee on CIF (Cost, Insurance, Freight) London and tell farmers to negotiate a farmgate price of between 62 and 67 percent of that.

Agriculture ministry officials say they have done everything to inform farmers about the upcoming liberalisation.

"Between July and mid-November, weorganised 110 meetings in our part of the Centre-West region at which a total of 7,067 farmers from 776 villages participated," one upcountry official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.The official said farmers understood more of the system than they let on but added that they should band together to protect themselves from unscrupulous middlemen.

"Farmers are going into the liberalisation individually. They are like sheep facing the wolves," he said.

Many farmers seem to buy into the idea that they will be better off under the new system but seem confused over the mechanics.

State radio and newspapers highlight the London price, currently over 900 CFA francs ($1.54) a kilo (2.2lb). The small-print, which few seem to have noticed, spells out that the farmgate price in Ivory Coast should be two-thirds of this -- or around 600 CFA.

"I have stocked six bags of coffee because radio said that the price is going to be 930 CFA francs," farmer Jean Sohou Gnomao told Reuters in Diahouin, a small village80 km south of Man, a major coffee-producing area.Gnomao, 61, never went to school. Aurelien Yehe, 30, who had four years of college before dropping out and returning to his village in 1989, explains the radio reports to him.

Diahouin listens to National Radio and Radio Man, which broadcasts in French and the local Yacouba language.

Gnomao and Yehe are not alone in their confusion. In several villages along the Man-Daloa road, farmers told Reuters that radio had "set" the new price at 930 CFA.

In Ivory Coast, as elsewhere in Africa, state radio holds considerable sway in the countryside -- the official voice of the authorities in the capital. But hearing the figure 930 CFA, which also emerged from a report on a meeting between farmers leaders and President Henri Konan Bedie, only made Gnomao bitter -- he had already sold 19 bags of 60 kilos, most of his harvest for the season.

"This year young men we had never seen before came from everywhere. They are Ivorians who went to school but have no job. Thefirst who came paid 450 CFA per kilo, later they paid 525 CFA francs," he said.

"I am very bitter. I don't know anymore at what price to sell," he said, adding that the six bags he had kept would remain inside his house until he would get 930 CFA a kilo.

Jean-Rufin Bahoun, a small-scale cocoa and coffee producer on the road between Daloa and Man, was equally unhappy.

"If this goes on I will concentrate on growing foodstuffs, not coffee and cocoa," he said.