How cocoa is farmed

Theobroma cacao is a perennial understorey tree of the humid tropics. It grows within roughly twenty degrees of the equator, needs shade when young, and produces pods directly from its trunk and main branches rather than from twigs.

A newly planted tree takes three to five years to bear and longer to reach full yield, and a productive tree may crop for several decades before declining. That is the single most consequential fact about the crop: supply cannot respond to a price signal for years, which is why cocoa prices are volatile and shortages persist.

Harvesting is manual and cannot readily be mechanised. Pods do not ripen simultaneously or fall when ripe, so a farm is walked repeatedly through a harvest season, ripe pods are cut with a blade on a pole, and the pods are gathered and opened by hand.

The beans and their surrounding pulp are then fermented — in heaps, boxes or baskets — for several days, and dried. Both of those steps happen on or near the farm, and both do more to determine the flavour of the finished chocolate than anything a factory does later.

That is worth stating plainly: the most consequential quality decisions in the entire chain are taken by the people paid least in it.

The great majority of the world's cocoa comes from smallholdings — commonly a few hectares — rather than from plantations. That shapes everything downstream: aggregation through buyers and cooperatives, difficulty tracing individual lots, limited capacity to absorb the cost of replanting, and limited bargaining position.

It also means most interventions in the sector are attempts to reach several million dispersed households through intermediaries, which is why they are difficult and why their effects are hard to measure.