Ghana’s cocoa crisis requires major structural changes to ensure its future
Close-up hands of a cocoa farmer use pruning shears to cut the cocoa pods or fruit ripe yellow cacao from the cacao tree. Harvest the agricultural cocoa business produces.
The recent assertion from Ghana’s newly-elected president John Mahama, that Cocobod, the organisation overseeing the second largest cocoa supplying nation on earth stands to lose a projected figure of $1.3 billion due to contracts being rolled-over for a year at the height of crop prices is particularly concerning.
Confectionery Production has followed events in the region particularly keenly, but this is an especially disturbing revelation if it indeed comes to pass – as farmers in the country, along with neighbouring Ivory Coast have been desperately fighting to raise their levels of pay to a living wage standard, and that now seems an awfully long way off as an objective.
What could $1.3 billion have done for them? It could have provided a huge incentive towards improving its regenerative agriculture programmes, as well simply being put directly into raising the raw farmgate prices beyond the modest increases that have failed to keep track with global rates for the cocoa sector.
As we reported last year, and indeed at the turn of 2025, cocoa has been changing hands on Futures markets in New York and London at especially high rates of around $12,000 a tonne, which has now eased to around $7-8,000 a tonne, which is still nearly triple what the fees were two years ago.
This speaks to the heart of the problem here – the government controlled system of managing cocoa production which was brought in to try and stabilise prices decades ago, does not come close to being nimble enough to match market conditions when its primary starting point is selling cocoa stock a year in advance. As a result, we saw that pressure on Ghana and Ivory Coast authorities did in fact see some relatively small pay increases, which were welcomed by farmers, but they were well short of securing a living wage for the sector.
As a number of observers have pointed out, unless there is now wholesale restructuring of the way in which cocoa is bought and sold in the critical markets of West Africa, then the future sustainability of the industry, and confectionery sector that is hugely reliant upon it, will be placed in significant doubt.
Neill Barston,editor, Confectionery Production
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Farmers have for long been the loosers, making nothing out of their labour. prices were never made by us but imposed on us. In Cameroon, local cocoa butter extractors still make a lot of money from cocoa butter and cake. it is just a matter of transferring some of the wealth to farmers and make it a win win situation for both. period
If Africa is having problems with reaching their yearly quota why not reach out to the Caribbean islands where most of the cocoa trees were uprooted from, mainly the Trintario cocoa trees from Trinidad &Tobago.
My grandfather was a cocoa and coffee farmer for his whole life and made a great living doing it in the 50’s and 60’s when Cocoa was King or so the natives used to say in Trinidad.
He left the estate to his children and grandchildren and we have been trying to break into the cocoa sector for many years now, with no success. Our estate is strictly organic, our grandfather showed us how to take care of the plants without using any pesticides. Hopefully in the next coming months the Caribbean islands can get a chance to help in the replenishment of cocoa.