African cocoa harvest might improve but your chocolate prices won't

Moussa Konate is an optimist who tempers hope with caution after a season in which his cocoa crop was ravaged by disease.

The outlook is brightening on his tiny Ivory Coast farm, where the October harvest is approaching fast. His trees are bearing abundant pods and the leaves are a healthy green.

That happy state reflects improvements across the West African cocoa belt that could help relieve a massive supply shortage which propelled prices to record highs this year. Alongside better weather, the 47-year old has finally received pesticides to help reduce the harm done by swollen shoot disease and expects yields to be significantly higher than the single ton that he gathered last season.

Yet issues that have long hobbled the industry remain far from fixed, meaning the price of beans that make chocolate isn’t likely to decline back to the much lower levels that had previously prevailed.

Swollen shoot is incurable, leaving farmers no option but to cut down sick trees, and training is scarce among Ivory’s Coast’s one million cocoa planters, the vast majority of whom are small-holders with limited resources. Konate’s 3.5-hectare (8.6 acre) plantation, one of three plots that he cultivates with three wives and nine children, is littered with felled trunks.

“Many farmers do not know that to prevent the spread of the virus, one should not use the same machete that was used to cut down affected trees,” he said, speaking on his farm in the village of Brazzaville, north of the port city of San Pedro.

Such challenges are likely to keep prices well above historic norms, even as a shift to La Nina promises better weather and some analysts expect global output to top demand for the first in four seasons. Analysts at Fitch Solutions’ BMI unit forecast rolling second-month cocoa futures in New York to average $7,000 a ton in 2024. Although that's down from eye watering levels above $11,000 earlier this year, most-active futures had averaged less than $2,000 for decades and the December contract is currently trading above $7,000.

“We are certainly not seeing the potential for a big surplus. There is still a lot that can happen in the next months,” said Steve Wateridge at Tropical Research Services. The market will most likely be balanced and “that’s not a good place to be in,” he said.

Lasting issues facing the region’s cocoa industry range from crop disease to climate change. It takes at least three years for a cocoa tree to reach fruit-bearing maturity, constraining how quickly production can ramp up. Ghana and the Ivory Coast also set farmgate prices in advance, a long-standing practice to protect growers from lower-than-expected prices, which dulls the incentive to lift supply in response to a booming market.

Both nations have made some adjustments. But several farmers told Bloomberg that they still couldn’t afford to buy enough fertilizer and pesticide, or hire more labor to help with pruning or hand pollination, which could help increase yields.

Governments also thwart foreign investment that could raise output. The status quo gives Ivory Coast and Ghana — the world’s number one and two producers who contribute more than half of global supply — powerful leverage over the market and they aren’t giving it up.

That’s why the expected recovery in West Africa’s production will mostly be driven by better weather, as La Nina brings more favorable conditions to the region later this year. In Ivory Coast, early pod counts showed output could rise about 10% from the prior season to 2 million tons, Bloomberg recently reported.

But it’s not guaranteed: Drier weather reported in July and August has led to below-normal soil moisture and is limiting crop growth, according to Brandon Fox, an operational meteorologist at Maxar Technologies Inc.

In addition, farmers fear the spread of swollen shoot, a destructive viral infection that reduces the yield of infected trees by up to 70%, according to studies. Ivory Coast and Ghana in particular are grappling with aging trees that are susceptible to diseases.

“Despite the many promising initiatives targeting this issue, substantial work remains to be done,” said Mariette Verbruggen, vice president, corporate affairs at the World Cocoa Foundation, referring to the disease. “These initiatives are not necessarily coordinated and hence do not reach the scale necessary to achieve lasting impact.”

A significant part of Ghana’s Western North region — the country’s cocoa hub — is infected with swollen shoot, according to a report from the International Cocoa Organization, citing the local regulator.

Jérémie Kan Kouassi, director of agricultural development support at Le Conseil du Cafe-Cacao, Ivory Coast’s industry regulator, said that around 200,000 hectares of cocoa plantations have been destroyed to stop the disease. That’s a sliver of the 3.5 million hectares the country has under cultivation.

But Wateridge estimates that about a quarter of farms are infected and other industry specialists agreed the problem is significant.

“This is unfortunately probably the tip of the iceberg because you don’t have the large scale testing for all non-symptomatic trees,” said Sanja Fabrio, business development director at SwissDeCode, a company that develops testing tools for swollen shoot disease.

The only known remedy requires cutting down infected trees and surrounding ones, but the difficulty remains persuading farmers of the need to destroy seemingly healthy stalks.

Looming European deforestation regulations, which means farmers cannot simply chop down forests to start new plantations, complicate attempts to move into uncontaminated areas.

“Good replanting helps offset the ravages of this virus,” said Konan Kouakou, a 35-year old farmer in Gabiadji in Ivory Coast. “It is difficult to expand cocoa plantations, because of the classified and protected forests.”

Still, farmers in Cameroon and Nigeria also expect to collect more pods in the 2024-25 season. And unlike their neighbors in Ivory Coast and Ghana, they benefited from the recent rally in prices earning above three times their counterparts.

“We have never reached this price level before,” said Monda Bakoa, who sold beans from his farm at Ndom, southwest Cameroon for more than 6,000 CFA franc ($10) per kilo, six times the previous harvest. “If the trend were to continue into the main crop harvest, many farmers will effectively become rich.”

High prices are drawing many people into cocoa farming, according to Mufutau Abolarinwa, president of the Cocoa Association of Nigeria, who sees the 2024-25 harvest yielding 285,000 metric tons compared with 270,000 tons in 2023-24.

In contrast, farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast earn between $2,100 and $2,500 a ton, less than a third of the terminal prices. Several told Bloomberg that the farmgate prices need to be raised to support cocoa cultivation.

Low pay has led frustrated farmers to sell their land for illegal gold mining, known in Ghana as galamsey, which does tremendous destruction through excavation and pollution.

“After destroying our land, the ‘galamseyers’ tend to hijack our farmhands too, so how do Ghanaian cocoa farmers with an average age of about 60 years manage?” asked Johnson Mensah, a chief farmer who supervises over 150,000 other growers in Enchi, Ghana. “Until galamsey is stopped Ghana’s cocoa doesn’t have a future.”

While he also sees illegal mining as a threat, it doesn’t dim the mood of Ebenezer Agyarko, who hums as he clears weeds on his 12.5 acre plantation near Kwabeng, north of Accra, the capital.

Smiling as he points out the pod-laden trees on his farm, he expects a fivefold increase in yields compared with the last crop which was stunted by bad weather, disease and a lack of pesticides.

“I only pray that the weather stays the same so I can harvest all these beans and sell them at a much higher price to help me pay all my outstanding bills.”