Côte d’Ivoire Cut Its Farmers. Ghana Wrote Them Into Law.
In September, the 2 countries that grow most of the world’s cocoa told their farmers what they would be paid for the new season.
Côte d’Ivoire: 1,200 CFA francs a kilo.
Less than half the 2,800 francs its farmers were paid a year earlier.
Ghana: GH₵42,400 a tonne.
A little more than the season before.
Same crop, same buyers, same crash. Opposite answers.
The crash
Cocoa went above $12,900 a tonne at the end of 2024, a record, as disease and bad weather cut West African harvests. Then it came down. By 13 February 2026 it was $3,429.
Both countries had already sold much of their crop forward, at prices fixed long before the fall. Ghana’s version was the worse surprise. Its finance minister, Cassiel Ato Forson, said buyers in the previous season had been drawn to a rollover contract priced far below the market.
“The key motivation for buyers in the previous season was the rollover contract priced at a rate of $2,661 per metric tonne when the existing market price were above $8,000 per metric tonne.”
Cassiel Ato Forson
When the market fell toward that price, the buyers stopped pre-financing Ghana’s crop. A financing model that had run for over 30 years broke.
The bean
Ghana took its pain early. On 12 February it cut the farmer’s price by 28.6%, to GH₵41,392 a tonne. A week later, farmers from the Western North Region carried placards and a petition to the Cocoa Marketing Board in Accra.
Then it wrote the farmer into law. The Ghana Cocoa Board Act, passed on 30 July and signed by President Mahama on 26 August, guarantees farmers at least 70% of the export price. It adds a pension scheme for cocoa farmers and a tribunal for disputes.
On 25 September the cocoa board set the new price at 71.18% of a realized export value of $2,650 a tonne.
GH₵42,400.
The factory
Côte d’Ivoire went the other way, years ago. In 2024 its factories ground 777,000 tonnes, about 44% of a 1.76 million tonne harvest. In June 2025 the state-owned processor Transcao opened a CFA130 billion plant that doubled its capacity to 100,000 tonnes.
Its price is set by a different logic. The agriculture minister, Bruno Nabagné Koné, said the new figure was the highest the Coffee-Cocoa Council’s forward sales could support, and one the budget could afford. The price had already been cut to 1,200 for the mid-crop in March. September only confirmed it.
But most of the grinding in Côte d’Ivoire is done by global firms such as Cargill, Barry Callebaut and Olam. A lower bean price is cheaper input for them.
1,200 CFA francs.
The bargain
Constance Sorkpor, a political economist who wrote his doctoral thesis on the 2 cocoa sectors, argues the split was never about technique.
“Moving up a value chain is not only an economic step. It is a political bargain between farmers, processors and the state.”
Constance Sorkpor
In Ghana, he writes, some 800,000 cocoa-farming families are organized enough that no government can ignore them, and the cocoa board grew up around protecting their price and the bean’s reputation. In Côte d’Ivoire, the liberalized market gave exporters and grinders more say, and policy leaned toward cheap beans for local factories.
Each country is protecting whoever sits at the center of its system. Neither got off free. Ghanaian farmers still took a 28.6% cut. Ivorian farmers took the whole fall.
The gap
The new Ghanaian law has a second clause that matters more for builders than the price does. From this season, at least 50% of Ghana’s beans must be processed at home.
Ghana has the machines. By Sorkpor’s count it can grind about 505,000 tonnes a year and has been grinding about 220,000. The beans went elsewhere because the cocoa board had pledged them as collateral for its foreign loans. A deputy finance minister called supplying local factories “practically impossible”.
That pledge is gone with the old financing model. The law now pushes beans toward Ghanaian factories, and every tonne ground at home becomes butter, powder and liquor that have to be stored, shipped, financed and sold.
Côte d’Ivoire built the factories and asked its farmers to carry the crash. Ghana protected its farmers and now has to fill its factories.
1,200 CFA francs. GH₵42,400.
Same crash. A different person at the table.