Ghana’s cocoa crisis requires major structural changes to ensure its future
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
keep in touch at [email protected] or via social media @confectionprod and our Linkedin pages
