Indonesia

Before 1980 Indonesian cocoa was an estate crop, concentrated on government plantations in East Java and North Sumatra. What changed it was not a plantation programme but migrant smallholders in Sulawesi, who planted cocoa on newly cleared land through the 1980s and 1990s. The port of Makassar, which had exported about 30 tonnes a year, was shipping some 200,000 tonnes twenty-five years later, and Sulawesi came to grow more than two-thirds of the national crop.

Official figures put the peak at about 845,000 tonnes in 2010. The same series has fallen since, to around 630,000 tonnes in 2024. The pest that followed the boom, cocoa pod borer, had reached most of Sulawesi's growing areas by 2000, and an industry estimate put the losses from it on that island alone at US$290 million in 2005.

It is still a smallholder crop. The chairman of the Indonesian Cocoa Association put smallholder ownership at nearly 99 per cent of plantations in 2026.

In April 2010 Indonesia put a tax on exports of raw cocoa beans, on a sliding scale from nothing to 15 per cent according to the world price. Processed cocoa was not taxed. The effect was immediate and is one of the clearest natural experiments in the cocoa trade: within two years bean exports had fallen by about half in both value and quantity, exports of cocoa paste had more than tripled, and beans had dropped from 76 per cent of the country's cocoa exports to 46 per cent.

The tax did what it was designed to do, which was to move grinding inside the country. It did not grow more cocoa. In 2026 the country's eleven processing plants were reported to have a combined capacity of 700,000 tonnes and to be running at 51 per cent for want of raw material. A country that once exported nearly all its beans raw now cannot fill its own factories.

This is why a single production figure is so unhelpful here. Indonesia is at once a large grower on one count, a modest one on another, and a large grinder short of beans, and which of those a reader meets depends on the measure.

The official national series, which is the one FAOSTAT carries, gives production of roughly 630,000 tonnes. The International Cocoa Organization's own count was 160,000 tonnes for 2022/23 and an estimated 180,000 for 2023/24. Indonesian officials quoted in 2026 used a figure of about 200,000 tonnes, and described the country as having fallen from third to seventh among producers.

Those cannot all be right, and no published reconciliation of them was found. What can be said is that the lower figure is the one consistent with the factories running half-empty and with the country importing beans, and the higher one is the one that appears in most rankings. Anything that depends on Indonesia's rank should say which figure it used. The data pages here show both.

The standard account of the sector, written in the mid-2000s, is blunt: apart from the larger estates on Java and Sumatra, Indonesia produces unfermented cocoa, and Sulawesi smallholders do not generally ferment. A survey in Central Sulawesi in 2017 found more than half of farmers still not fermenting.

The reason is price. Fermentation takes several days and ties up beans a farmer could sell at once, and for most of that period the market paid little or nothing more for the result. Where a buyer has paid a real premium, farmers have fermented; the cooperative in Jembrana, in Bali, is the example the Food and Agriculture Organization itself points to.

The national research institute at Jember has released a series of clones for bulk cocoa, named for the institute or for where they were selected: ICCRI 03, 04 and 07, Sulawesi 01, 02 and 03, and the later MCC 01 and MCC 02. Its own leaflet rates each for resistance to the two problems that define Indonesian cocoa farming, vascular-streak dieback and cocoa pod borer. Sulawesi 01 is rated resistant to the dieback; MCC 02 is rated resistant to both.

The yields quoted for them, above three tonnes a hectare for the MCC clones, are the releasing institute's stated potential at 1,100 trees a hectare. They are not farm averages, and the national average is a small fraction of them.

As of September 2026 the Agriculture Ministry's stated target was 247,260 hectares of smallholder cocoa to be replanted or newly planted between 2025 and 2027, with most of it scheduled for 2026, and the agency that manages the palm-oil plantation fund is a partner in it. These are targets. No figure for hectares actually replanted was found.

The Dominican Republic exports fermented and unfermented cacao from the same trees at very different prices. Indonesia demonstrates the same thing at national scale and in the negative: an origin can acquire a poor reputation entirely through a post-harvest practice, with the underlying material never being the constraint.