Cacao in Côte d'Ivoire
The world's largest producer, built on migration and forest clearing within living memory — and the country where the sector's hardest problems are most concentrated.
This is a current practice
A current and rapidly changing situation: production, regulation, forest cover and pricing mechanisms are all in motion, and the traceability requirements now placed on exporters will change how the sector is organised. This record has one of the shortest useful lives in the section.
Côte d'Ivoire grows more cacao than any other country and has done so since the late twentieth century. That position is recent: the expansion happened largely from the 1960s onwards, driven by migration into forested regions in the south and west, and by planting on newly cleared land.
The demographic reality of that expansion is the thing most accounts leave out. A very large share of cacao farming households have origins elsewhere — other regions, and neighbouring countries — and questions of land tenure, citizenship and who has the right to farm which land have been entangled with the crop for decades, including through the country's periods of conflict.
It is also where the sector's most documented problems sit, because it is where most of the cacao is. The child labour prevalence research covers Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana together; the deforestation figures are heaviest here; and the living income differential was introduced jointly by the two governments precisely because they together have enough of the world's supply to attempt price-setting.
None of that is a statement about the people farming it. It is a statement about a crop whose global economics were arranged elsewhere.
- Period
- 1960s to the present
- Region
- Côte d'Ivoire
- Kind of record
- Living practice
Who developed this
Ivorian cacao is routinely written about from the consuming end — as a supply risk, a compliance problem or a campaign subject — and rarely as the livelihood of several million people with their own histories of migration and settlement. A record that only lists what is wrong with a place has described the place badly.
Significance
The largest single source of the world's cacao, and the country whose scale makes producer-side price intervention possible at all.
Why the problems concentrate here
Partly because the cacao does. A country growing roughly two fifths of the world's supply will show up in any measurement of the sector's difficulties, and a share of what reads as an Ivorian problem is a cocoa problem measured where the cocoa is.
Partly, though, it is structural. The expansion happened fast, on cleared forest, with migrant labour and contested land tenure, and within a state marketing system that fixes the farmgate price. Each of those makes a specific problem more likely, and they interact.
Related
History and culture
- Ivory CoastThe agronomy and the production profile.
- Child labour in cocoaThe prevalence research covers this country and Ghana, and the finding is about household labour on farms that cannot afford to hire.
- Deforestation and cocoaForest clearing was the mechanism of the expansion, and is the pressure the current regulation is aimed at.
- Cocoa supply chainWhere an Ivorian bean goes after the farm, and where its identity is lost.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Quarterly Bulletin of Cocoa Statistics — International Cocoa Organization (ICCO)(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Assessing Progress in Reducing Child Labor in Cocoa Growing Areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana: Final Report — NORC at the University of Chicago, 2020(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Cocoa Barometer — VOICE Network and partner civil-society organisations(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)