Current as of 26 August 2026
This describes the state of things at the date shown, without a claim about which way it is moving next. Checked every three months. First observed: The 2023/24 season; conditions have swung in both directions since.
West African weather and the cocoa crop
The same two countries have had a drought-and-disease crop, a recovery crop and a flooded crop within three seasons. Weather is the proximate cause of most cocoa price movement, and the mechanism by which rainfall becomes a price is worth understanding once, because it recurs.
Cocoa's supply shocks are weather shocks, and West Africa's weather has been unusually eventful. The 2023/24 season combined heavy early rain with a severe dry season and heavy disease pressure, and produced the deficit that broke the price. Subsequent seasons were kinder and the crop recovered. In mid-2026, flooding across Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana revived concern for the 2026/27 crop and the price responded within days.
What would make this page wrong
Written before the page went up rather than added afterwards. If one of these has happened since the date above, treat what follows as history.
- The 2026/27 main crop arriving, which will show whether the mid-2026 flooding damaged pods or merely frightened the market.
- A confirmed El Niño or La Niña development, which shifts West African rainfall probabilities — although the relationship is statistical rather than deterministic and has been overstated in commodity commentary.
- Replanting programmes reaching bearing age in either producing country, which would change how much a bad season costs.
What stays true when this is over
The mechanism is durable even when the season is not. Cacao is a shallow-rooted understorey tree with almost no drought tolerance and a pod that takes five to six months to mature, so a weather event affects a crop that will not be harvested for half a year. Too much rain spreads black pod, which is a water-borne fungal disease; too little kills flowers and cherelles outright. The harmattan — the dry, dust-carrying wind off the Sahara between roughly December and February — is the specific hazard of the West African dry season and a harsh one can take a large share of the light crop. None of that changes between cycles.
How rain becomes a price, step by step
FLOWERING. Cacao flowers on the trunk and older branches, in flushes, and the great majority of flowers never set a pod. Heat and water stress at flowering reduce the number that do.
CHERELLE WILT. Young pods abort naturally — it is the tree's own load-shedding — and the rate rises sharply under stress. A dry spell here removes pods that were already counted by the optimists.
POD FILL. Five to six months from set to harvest. Drought during fill gives small beans and low yield per pod; excessive wet gives black pod, which rots the pod on the tree.
HARVEST AND FERMENTATION. Rain at harvest is its own problem: beans must be fermented and then dried, drying is usually done in the sun on mats or raised beds, and a wet harvest period produces underdried beans, mould risk and rejected lots.
So the price reacts to weather with a lag of months and reacts again at harvest to weather that would not have mattered earlier. That two-stage sensitivity is why cocoa is more weather-reactive than crops harvested in a single window.
Weather interacts with disease, and the interaction is the real damage
The two are usually reported separately and behave as one thing.
BLACK POD is a Phytophthora disease and it moves with water. A wet season is a black pod season, and in a bad one it takes a very large share of pods in affected areas. Control is fungicide plus sanitation — removing infected pods — and both cost money a farmer may not have after a poor previous season.
SWOLLEN SHOOT is a virus spread by mealybugs, it is not weather-driven in the same way, and its damage is permanent: infected trees decline and are removed. Its spread through parts of Côte d'Ivoire is a structural loss of capacity rather than a bad year.
The compounding is what produced 2023/24: a stressed crop, high disease pressure, and farms with no cash for inputs after several thin years. The pests and diseases section covers each pathogen properly.
Widely said, not established
These are claims in circulation about this subject that the evidence available to this catalogue does not carry. They are listed rather than ignored, because a reader who has met them elsewhere is entitled to know where they stand.
- A confident attribution of any single season to climate change. The long-run direction of the risk is well supported and covered in the sustainability section; the causation of one drought is a different and much harder claim, and attribution studies for West African cocoa seasons are not something this catalogue has read.
- Specific 2026/27 crop loss figures. In August 2026 the crop was in the ground and the numbers circulating were trade estimates, which historically span a very wide range at this stage of a season.
- A simple El Niño rule. Commodity commentary regularly asserts one; the published climatology is a shift in probabilities across a region with substantial local variation.
Related
What is happening now
- Cacao and climate changeThe long-run picture this record is one season's news within: what warming does to the land currently suitable for cacao.
- Climate risk in cacaoThe evidence on climate risk in cacao, with the conditions each finding depends on stated — the standing treatment behind a seasonal report.
Sources
- Quarterly Bulletin of Cocoa Statistics, No. 2, Volume LII, cocoa year 2025/26 (May 2026) — International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), 2026(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Confectionery and bakery trade coverage of cocoa pricing, reformulation and viral product trends, 2025-2026 — Assorted trade press (ConfectioneryNews, BakeryAndSnacks, FoodNavigator and similar), 2026(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
How this page is kept current
Dates on this site are advanced by a person who has re-read the record, never by a build step. If the date at the top of this page is old, that is the honest state of it rather than a bug — and the list of what would make it wrong is there so you can check for yourself. See the editorial policy.