The African Union Commission, ECOWAS, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa have launched a programme to develop cross border agro industrial value chains between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, focusing initially on cocoa and rice processing in what officials describe as a strategic test case for continental trade integration.
The initiative, formally launched on August 20, 2025, in Accra aims to harmonize standards, expand processing capacity, and create agro industrial parks to anchor joint production between two countries that together supply approximately 60% of the world’s cocoa beans but process only a fraction domestically.
According to the Afreximbank Regional Integration and Market Access Insights September 2025 report, the programme represents a new regional strategy to build borderless value chains across West Africa and strengthen linkages between agriculture, manufacturing, and trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area framework.
The Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire corridor makes strategic sense on paper. Côte d’Ivoire produces roughly 45% of global cocoa supply, while Ghana contributes approximately 20%, making them dominant suppliers to international chocolate manufacturers who process the beans in Europe and North America while West African farmers capture minimal value from the final products.
Joan Kagwanja, Chief of the Land and Agriculture Section at UNECA, positioned the AfCFTA as transformative during the launch workshop, noting that the continental free trade zone covering 1.2 billion people projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050 represents one of the world’s largest markets.
The initiative operates within the African Union’s Common African Agro Parks programme, an AfCFTA associated Agenda 2063 flagship adopted in 2019. The project will support Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire as they explore a common agro industrial park model, drawing lessons from the Zambia and Zimbabwe collaboration that preceded it.
Janet Edeme, Director of Rural Economy and Agriculture at the African Union Commission, emphasized that the pre feasibility study marks the first technical step toward creating a bankable investment case for the envisaged common agro park between the two West African neighbors.
Beyond cocoa, the inclusion of rice processing reflects broader policy ambitions to reduce import dependence and improve regional food security amid global price volatility. West Africa imports substantial quantities of rice annually despite having suitable growing conditions, a paradox that regional integration advocates have criticized for decades.
The programme seeks to align production with regional quality standards, strengthen logistics infrastructure, and promote investment in processing zones backed by the African Development Bank and UNDP. Whether these development partners will provide sufficient financing to transform ambitious plans into operational facilities remains an open question.
For businesses, the initiative signals potential investment opportunities in agro processing, logistics, packaging, and warehousing, particularly for firms operating along Ghana’s western corridor and Côte d’Ivoire’s eastern regions where the proposed infrastructure would concentrate.
Local agribusinesses and processors stand to benefit from improved access to inputs, shared infrastructure, and theoretically larger regional markets for processed goods. However, the success depends heavily on both governments harmonizing regulations, maintaining stable policies, and resisting protectionist impulses when domestic constituencies complain about competition.
ECOWAS Coordinator Zonon Abdoulaye noted that the Commission recently reviewed its regional industrial policy with agro processing among prioritized sectors, suggesting institutional alignment exists at the regional level even if implementation capacity remains questionable.
The timing coincides with severe production challenges facing both countries’ cocoa sectors. Ghana’s cocoa output plummeted to approximately 425,000 metric tons in the 2023/2024 season, down from over 1 million metric tons in 2020/2021, due to swollen shoot virus disease, erratic rainfall, illegal mining encroachment, and smuggling driven by price differentials with Côte d’Ivoire.
Côte d’Ivoire faced similar weather disruptions and disease pressures, though its larger production base provided some cushion. The 2024/2025 season projections remain uncertain, with Harmattan winds and suboptimal rainfall raising concerns about another disappointing harvest that could further strain cocoa dependent economies.
These production challenges make the processing initiative even more critical yet simultaneously more difficult to execute. Establishing new processing capacity requires predictable raw material supplies, but both countries struggle to maintain consistent production levels given climatic variability and aging tree stocks.
Both governments have raised farmgate prices attempting to discourage smuggling and incentivize proper farming practices, but these price increases squeeze processing margins and make domestic grinding less competitive internationally unless accompanied by improved productivity and quality premiums.
The European Union’s deforestation free products regulations, becoming mandatory December 30, 2025, for large companies and June 30, 2026, for smaller enterprises, add urgency to sustainable production and processing infrastructure development. Meeting these requirements could open premium markets or exclude West African producers unable to demonstrate compliance.
The Afreximbank report positions the Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire initiative as a model for AfCFTA era regional industrial cooperation, intended to demonstrate how integrated value chains can stimulate jobs, enhance competitiveness, and deepen West Africa’s participation in continental trade.
Whether this ambition translates into functioning cross border agro industrial parks with meaningful processing capacity, sustained employment creation, and genuine value addition remains uncertain. Africa has witnessed numerous regional integration initiatives announced with fanfare that subsequently stalled during implementation due to financing gaps, bureaucratic obstacles, political interference, or simple loss of momentum.
The programme’s success requires sustained political commitment from both governments, adequate multilateral financing, private sector confidence to invest in processing infrastructure, harmonized regulatory frameworks that don’t shift unpredictably, and farmers producing sufficient quality raw materials to feed expanded processing capacity.
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have cooperated before, forming the Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana Cocoa Initiative in 2018 to coordinate pricing and marketing strategies, though critics described it as an ineffective cartel that failed to meaningfully shift market power from multinational chocolate companies to producing countries.
This new value chain initiative takes a different approach, focusing on downstream processing rather than upstream coordination, but faces similar challenges around executing collective action when national interests diverge and powerful international buyers resist African producers capturing larger shares of chocolate industry profits.
The project timeline extends through feasibility studies, financing mobilization, site selection, construction, equipment installation, workforce training, and operational ramp up, meaning tangible results won’t materialize for several years even under optimistic scenarios.
For Ghana’s approximately 800,000 cocoa farm families and Côte d’Ivoire’s estimated 200,000 farmers in organized cocoa communities, the promise of local processing capacity that adds value before export represents hope for improved livelihoods, though decades of similar promises have conditioned farmers to skepticism about whether benefits will actually reach them.
The rice component faces different but equally formidable challenges. Unlike cocoa where both countries have established production, developing competitive rice value chains requires overcoming fragmented farming, limited mechanization, inadequate irrigation, poor seed quality, and entrenched consumer preferences for imported varieties.
Regional integration advocates have promoted cross border agricultural value chains for years as mechanisms to increase productivity, create employment, and reduce Africa’s food import bills that drain foreign exchange. The Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire programme will test whether these theoretical benefits can materialize through practical implementation or remain aspirational rhetoric disconnected from ground realities.
For now, stakeholders have launched a programme, commissioned studies, held validation workshops, and generated optimistic statements about transforming West Africa’s agricultural economies through integrated cross border ecosystems. Whether they can translate these activities into operational processing facilities employing thousands of workers and adding substantial value to cocoa and rice production will determine if this initiative joins the list of successful regional integration models or forgotten pilot programmes that never scaled beyond initial enthusiasm.
