A sharp fall in cocoa prices over the past year has left beans rotting in some West African warehouses, while global chocolate makers scramble for supplies and consumers continue to seek their fix. Ghana and Ivory Coast are responsible for nearly 70 per cent of the global cocoa bean supply, and many farmers in both countries are now putting their land to other uses after the price of the once high-flying commodity crashed. After nearly tripling to record levels in 2024, world cocoa prices have since lost about three-quarters of their value, plunging to around $3,100 per tonne, as chocolate-makers reduced bar sizes, increased non-cocoa additives such as wafers and nuts, and cut back orders in response to the earlier record-high prices.
Ghana slashed its fixed price for cocoa beans by 28 per cent in January to 41,392 cedis ($3,881) per metric tonne in an attempt to make the beans accessible to buyers again, while Ivory Coast, the world’s leading cocoa producer, slashed its farmgate price by more than half to 1,200 CFA francs ($2.13) per kilogram for 2026. Farmers say the cuts have all but wiped out their profit margins. Mercy Amponsah, a 50-year-old cocoa farmer in Ghana who travelled to Accra to protest the price cut in January, said that accepting the current price meant her son would have to drop out of school. By February 2026, outstanding payment arrears owed to Ghanaian farmers exceeded 10 billion cedis, with many who had delivered cocoa in November and December 2025 not yet having been paid.
Manu Yaw Fofie, a 52-year-old cocoa farmer in Kona, Ghana, has taken the desperate step of giving part of his land to illegal sand miners — a lucrative practice driven by high construction demand — even though the sand mining renders the land permanently infertile. He said his annual cocoa yield had fallen from 300 bags in better years to just 50 bags in 2025, affected by a combination of climate change and collapsing prices. In Ivory Coast, the government launched a programme to buy 100,000 tonnes of unsold main-crop cocoa stocks from farmers at a cost of half a billion dollars in an attempt to get cash into their hands. The Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a rare statement describing the rescue of the cocoa industry as a moral imperative, warning of unpaid labour, disrupted schooling, mounting debt, and growing vulnerability to illegal mining.
