In Steve Wateridge’s four decades covering cocoa, he said he’s never before experienced this level of global captivation by the cocoa market and its prices. Then again, prices have never been this high.
“It’s a shame they didn’t care about it a bit more five years ago when something could have been done and should have been done to address what are long-term structural issues, but that’s the way of the world,” said Wateridge, who is head of research for Tropical Research Services.
Before 2024, the historic high for cocoa sat around $5,000 per metric ton. So far this year, cocoa has traded as high as $12,000, and even as prices have gone down in recent days, futures are still double what they were at the start of the year.
“The cocoa market has been very quiet for a long period of time, but underneath the surface, there have been issues developing in the two largest producing countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, which between them, account for 65% or 70% of world production,” Wateridge said. “There’s a disease called cocoa swollen shoot virus that spreads very slowly, but if it’s not controlled, it does eventually kill trees and it spreads further. In the last 12 months, I think there’s been a realization that we’ve reached a tipping point.”
The current prices haven’t been passed on to the consumers yet.
Steve Wateridge, Tropical Research Services
Though cocoa prices have tripled in the past year, it has yet to reach consumers, since the high prices are for future contracts.
“It’s really probably not until the back end of the year, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, that we start seeing further price increases in chocolate confectionary,” Wateridge said. “In the meantime, I suspect what will happen is that the industry will try to use as little cocoa in their products as possible.”
That can be done by adding ingredients like fruit and nuts to chocolate bars. Wateridge said ultimately, consumers will see the price hike.
Though farmers elsewhere in the world are benefiting from higher prices, those who produce the majority of the world’s cocoa – farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana – cannot say the same. In these two countries, the farm price is set at the beginning of October. In April, both governments agreed to pay farmers 50% more for their crops.
“But that still only took the farmer price up to $2,500, whereas in places like Cameroon, Nigeria, where there’s a free market, the farmers receive $7,500,” Wateridge explained. “So the biggest producers who need to restructure their cocoa production are not receiving yet the benefits of the high prices.”
Swollen shoot will kill the trees in the next two or three years, so they’re not going to recover until they’re dug up and replanted, and that takes time.
Steve Wateridge, Tropical Research Services
Wateridge said better farm care needs to be incentivized, especially in West Africa. In the short term, addressing crop declines requires pruning, spraying against disease and fertilizing.
“Now that won’t change the downward trend in production, but it will shift it up to a higher level,” he said.
In the long term, he said these aging and diseased trees must be replaced.
“When you do that, it takes three years before trees start producing and five years before they reach maturity,” Wateridge said. “High prices will cure high prices eventually, but it doesn’t send it back to where it started. We need to sustain a supply-demand balance. We need to reward farmers better.”
“It’s difficult to believe that we can turn this around simply on the supply side,” he added. “In the short term, we do need, basically, people to eat less cocoa.”
