Aug 14, 2026 · 9 min · 11 segments
Four African countries — Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon — produce around 75% of the world’s cocoa, yet farmers capture only a small share of the value created by the global chocolate…
Now, producer countries trying to gain more control over cocoa is not a new story.
Attempts at international cocoa coordination stretch back decades.
Agreements during the nineteen seventies introduced price stabilization mechanisms.
In the nineteen eighties, producers experimented with a buffer stock of around two hundred and fifty thousand tons, buying and storing cocoa when prices were weak.
Those systems eventually failed.
In twenty nineteen, they introduced the Living Income Differential, or LID, adding four hundred dollars per ton to cocoa prices with the aim of improving farmer incomes.
Initially, it appeared to work.
By October twenty twenty, Ghana's guaranteed farmgate price had risen twenty-eight percent, while Côte d'Ivoire's had increased twenty-one percent.
But buyers adapted.
Some chocolate companies paid the new four hundred dollar charge while reducing other premiums they had previously paid for cocoa quality and origin, so part of the benefit disappeared.
And that is one of the lessons behind this new alliance.
Changing one part of the cocoa price does not mean the rest of the market stays still.
Now, producer countries trying to gain more control over cocoa is not a new story.
Attempts at international cocoa coordination stretch back decades.
Agreements during the nineteen seventies introduced price stabilization mechanisms.
In the nineteen eighties, producers experimented with a buffer stock of around two hundred and fifty thousand tons, buying and storing cocoa when prices were weak.
Those systems eventually failed.
In twenty nineteen, they introduced the Living Income Differential, or LID, adding four hundred dollars per ton to cocoa prices with the aim of improving farmer incomes.
Initially, it appeared to work.
By October twenty twenty, Ghana's guaranteed farmgate price had risen twenty-eight percent, while Côte d'Ivoire's had increased twenty-one percent.
But buyers adapted.
Some chocolate companies paid the new four hundred dollar charge while reducing other premiums they had previously paid for cocoa quality and origin, so part of the benefit disappeared.
And that is one of the lessons behind this new alliance.
Changing one part of the cocoa price does not mean the rest of the market stays still.
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