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Climate change
CommentWorld
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Outside In | What price chocolate as climate change hits cocoa crops of poor farmers?

  • Chocolate will stay expensive as the cocoa crop faces existential challenges while demand continues to surge, including from China
  • The most urgent task is to grow cocoa without harming the environment, and ensure that cocoa farmers can lift themselves out of poverty in the process

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A pile of cocoa pods, showing signs of black pod disease, during a harvest at a farm in the town of Kwabeng, Ghana, on October 22 last year. Photo: Bloomberg
David Dodwell

Just as Britain’s most iconic chocolate-maker, Cadbury, celebrates the 200th anniversary of its establishment on Bull Street in Birmingham in 1824, today’s chocolate industry is in turmoil over a sharp and widening divide between the people who make it, and the people who love to consume it.

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Millions of smallholders contribute to the 6.5 million tonnes of cocoa beans that underpin the US$120 billion chocolate industry, which faces a long list of existential challenges including the pestilent cocoa swollen shoot virus disease and black pod disease, ageing, less productive trees, farm-gate prices so low that farmers often earn barely US$1 a day, and the scourge of child labour.
Cocoa growers are under pressure to switch to easier crops like cassava even as the cocoa industry attracts global concern over the deforestation it causes. Top supplier the Ivory Coast has lost around 85 per cent of its forests since 1960.

Cocoa trees, already fussy to grow, are also becoming a more difficult crop with climate change. In West Africa, where almost two-thirds of the world’s cocoa is grown, unseasonal weather has disrupted production and Ghana, the world’s second largest producer, expects its crop to shrink by a quarter.

Meanwhile, demand from the rich West continues to surge, sending cocoa prices to record highs.

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Worries that might normally be temporarily brushed aside as the ebbs and flows of food supply and demand are capturing keener attention than usual. This is not just because of the long-term nature of climate change and other existential challenges, but because of China – both as an emerging exporter (China sold cocoa to Europe for the first time in 2021, triggering subdued panic among leading growers) and a potentially huge source of demand.

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