Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire pledged to harmonise cocoa pricing on June 16, but traders have already stripped nearly two thirds of value from their signature farmer premium.
President John Mahama and President Alassane Ouattara signed the commitment in a Joint Declaration following the Côte d’Ivoire-Ghana High-Level Summit on the Future of the Cocoa Economy in Abidjan, building on a cooperation framework the two countries first set out in 2018. The agreement commits both nations to align farm-gate pricing, synchronise crop season calendars and coordinate premiums, leaning on their combined weight as producers of roughly 60 percent of the world’s cocoa.
That weight has not translated into control over price. Since October 2020, both countries have charged a Living Income Differential (LID) of 400 dollars a tonne on top of the benchmark price, meant to route more value back to farmers. Major traders responded by applying negative country differentials now estimated at about 260 dollars a tonne, a discount that industry assessments say has wiped out as much as 65 percent of what the LID was supposed to deliver. Of what remains, farmers reportedly capture only around 60 percent.
The Côte d’Ivoire-Ghana Cocoa Initiative’s own steering committee put the wider problem in blunt terms at its seventh meeting ahead of the summit: the two countries produce roughly 80 percent of the world’s cocoa yet capture a negligible share of the industry’s profits. COCOBOD chief executive Dr. Randy Abbey told the gathering that closing that gap depends on the two governments holding a common line rather than competing for buyers. “With one accord, the two countries can achieve a lot,” he said.
The price cuts both countries announced for the 2025/2026 season illustrate the pressure they are working against. Ghana lowered its farm-gate price 28.6 percent to 41,392 cedis a tonne, about 3,580 dollars, while Côte d’Ivoire cut its price 57 percent to roughly 2,140 dollars a tonne, both adjustments tracking a falling global benchmark. Ghana’s government has since approved a new formula paying farmers about 70 percent of the declared world market price, which helps explain why this season’s cut landed where it did even as the LID stayed nominally in place.
Output has not made the picture easier. National production fell from about 1.04 million tonnes in the 2020/2021 season to roughly 531,000 tonnes in 2023/2024, recovered to an estimated 700,000 tonnes in 2024/2025, and COCOBOD is now targeting a lower 650,000 tonnes for the current season. Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus is affecting between 30 and 50 percent of farms in some growing areas, and early signals point to below average tree development heading into 2026/2027, with forecasters flagging a real chance of El Niño disruption across West Africa.
COCOBOD is separately working through a financing overhaul, including a tranche based commercial paper programme meant to ease a debt load estimated near 32 billion cedis. Both governments also agreed to push the cooperation framework out to other African cocoa producers, betting that a wider bloc will be harder for buyers to play off against each other than two countries acting alone, the same dynamic that has chipped away at the LID since 2020.
