Who grows cocoa

Cocoa is grown by millions of smallholder households across West Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, with the largest concentration by far in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, which between them grow well over half the world's crop.

A typical household farms a few hectares, sells to a buyer or through a cooperative, and derives a large share of its cash income from a crop harvested once or twice a year. Income arrives in concentrated periods and has to last.

The farmgate price — what a farmer actually receives — is set well below the exchange price and does not track it closely upward. Intermediaries, transport, quality deductions, and in some countries a state marketing board setting a fixed seasonal price all sit between the two.

So a price spike on the London or New York exchange does not translate into a proportional rise at the farm, while cost increases generally do reach it. That asymmetry is why living income initiatives exist, and it is the structural fact underneath most other problems in the sector — including child labour, which is substantially a household-labour phenomenon on farms that cannot afford to hire.

Most cocoa leaves its country of origin as dried beans and is turned into chocolate elsewhere, which means the value added by processing accrues in consuming countries. It also means many cocoa farmers have never tasted chocolate made from their own beans, which is regularly reported and is a genuine fact about the industry's structure rather than a rhetorical flourish.

Tree-to-bar manufacture at origin is the direct response to this, and it remains a small share of production.