Cocoa prices broke $10,000 per ton for the first time in March, amid disease outbreaks and destructive weather patterns in West Africa. Cocoa futures were as high as $10,080 in New York at the close of the first quarter, having more than doubled this year – due to expectations of a shortage of cocoa beans, the raw material used to make chocolate.
Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Cameroon together produce more than 75% of the world’s cocoa, but have seen drastically reduced crop yields amid droughts, fires and other climate change-induced weather phenomena. Drought index data from the Gro Intelligence platform indicates that the current drought in West Africa is the worst the region has seen since at least 2003.
On top of that, the Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria reported that fires destroyed over 30 hectares (74 acres) of cocoa farmlands in the first quarter in Abia state, a major cocoa producer in southeast Nigeria. That could see a loss of 11,000 to 12,000 tonnes of cocoa from the mid-crop harvest in Nigeria. This would represent roughly 4% of the commodity’s anticipated production this year, which is between 280,000 and 300,000 tons.
