Africa's Cocoa Market After the Price Crash: What $4,000/t Means for Cameroon, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire
After hitting a 46-year high of $11,530 per tonne in June 2024, cocoa futures have fallen sharply. We examine what the correction to around $4,180/t means for the three countries that together produce most of the world's supply.
Cocoa is trading at approximately $4,180 per tonne on ICE, down $120 on the week and 2.79% lower over five sessions. That is a 64% fall from the June 2024 peak of $11,530/t, the highest price the contract has reached in 46 years. The weekly range has been narrow — $4,100 to $4,340 — which suggests the market has found a level rather than that it is still falling.
The rally that took cocoa above $11,000 was a supply story, not a demand one. Two consecutive poor harvests in West Africa, driven by black pod disease and an unusually severe harmattan, cut output from a region that supplies more than 70% of the world crop. The correction since then is the same story running backwards: growing conditions across Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire improved through the 2025-26 main crop, and the market has priced that in.
For the producing countries the arithmetic is less symmetrical than the price chart suggests. Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire both set a fixed farmgate price ahead of each season through their regulators, COCOBOD and the Conseil du Café-Cacao. That mechanism protects farmers from a mid-season collapse, and it means the state absorbs the difference when the world price falls below what has been promised. A drop from $11,530 to $4,180 within two seasons puts real pressure on that buffer, and COCOBOD's borrowing costs have moved accordingly.
Cameroon runs a liberalised market instead, with farmgate prices moving with the world price. Cameroonian farmers saw more of the 2024 upside than their Ghanaian counterparts did, and they are seeing more of the downside now. Cocoa is Cameroon's second-largest agricultural export after timber, and the country produces roughly 300,000 tonnes a year — small beside Côte d'Ivoire's 2 million, but a significant share of rural income in the South-West and Centre regions.
The figure to watch through the rest of 2026 is not the front-month price but the spread between it and the farmgate prices already committed for the season. Where that spread is negative and the state is carrying it, the cost shows up in sovereign borrowing rather than in the commodity market — which is where the story stops being about cocoa and starts being about Ghana's fiscal position.