In April 2024 the price of cocoa on the New York and London futures exchanges briefly cleared US$12,000 per tonne. The commodity had traded at roughly US$2,500 for most of the preceding decade and had been at about US$4,000 as recently as January of the same year, which means the price close to tripled in the space of a season. Nothing in the demand side had changed. The chocolate industry had not suddenly started using more cocoa, and consumers had not suddenly started eating more chocolate.
What had changed was that Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the two neighbouring West African countries that together grow about 60 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans, had both had a bad growing season at the same time. The Ghana Cocoa Board’s official 2023-24 harvest came in at 425,000 tonnes, a 22-year low and roughly half of what had been forecast twelve months earlier. Côte d’Ivoire’s crop fell by about 21 per cent to its lowest level in eight years. Between them the two countries produced somewhere in the region of 500,000 tonnes less cocoa than the world had expected, and the world’s chocolate manufacturers had to bid for what remained.
Why the supply is that concentrated
Cocoa is a tropical understory tree native to the western Amazon, and it grows commercially only in a narrow belt within about 20 degrees of the equator, where the temperature stays in a specific range and the rainfall lands in a specific pattern. Within that belt, West Africa is where roughly 70 per cent of the world’s supply comes from, and within West Africa, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are the two largest producers by a large margin, with Nigeria and Cameroon accounting for most of the rest.
Neither country planned for its economy to run on cocoa; it just turned out that the coastal forest zone of the Gulf of Guinea suited the plant almost perfectly, and both countries expanded aggressively in the second half of the twentieth century as export earners. Nigeria and Cameroon combined don’t produce enough to cover a shortfall in either of the two big producers, and the other significant growers, in Indonesia, Ecuador and Brazil, are on a different continent with a different growing calendar. When Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have a bad season, no one else in the world is positioned to make up the gap in that same season.
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What happened to the weather
The 2023-24 growing cycle in West Africa was hit from two directions. Late 2023 brought unusually intense rainfall to both countries, more than double the 30-year average in some months, which created the wet conditions in which cocoa’s fungal enemies thrive; black pod disease, in particular, went through the region’s plantations and rotted pods on the trees before they could be harvested. Then the wet turned into the opposite. Early 2024 saw a prolonged dry period intensified by the tail end of the 2023-24 El Niño, and in February the region was hit by an early-season heatwave that arrived weeks before its usual peak.
According to a rapid attribution study by the World Weather Attribution consortium published in March 2024, the humid heat that hit the coastal zone of West Africa between the 11th and 15th of February drove area-average heat index values to about 50°C and locally to 60°C. Accra, the Ghanaian capital, recorded 38°C on the 7th of February, which was the hottest day in the city’s history at the time. The WWA analysis concluded that human-induced climate change had made the event about 4°C hotter and at least ten times more likely to occur than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate.
The longer trend the acute event sits inside
The February 2024 heatwave was an acute event, but it happened against a background of gradual warming that the cocoa belt has been experiencing for years. An analysis published by Climate Central in February 2025 used the group’s Climate Shift Index methodology to compare observed temperatures in 44 major cacao-growing regions across Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria against modelled counterfactual temperatures for a world without human-induced warming.
The results were consistent across the region. In the ten-year period from 2015 to 2024, climate change had added roughly 40 additional days per year with maximum temperatures above 32°C, the upper limit of cacao’s optimal growing range, in the cocoa-producing zones of both Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Cameroon and Nigeria showed smaller but still significant additions of 18 and 14 days respectively. Of the 44 regions analysed, 28 experienced at least six additional weeks per year of temperatures above the crop’s optimum, attributable to human-caused warming. Cocoa is a temperature-sensitive plant, and every additional week above its threshold reduces flowering, pollination and pod set. The 2024 shock was the acute failure; the underlying trend is that the growing conditions the whole industry depends on are moving.
How rainfall in Ghana becomes a price on a shelf in London
The mechanical link between a wet December in Kumasi and a more expensive Easter egg in a British supermarket runs through the international cocoa futures market, which is where about two-thirds of the world’s cocoa is priced. Manufacturers hedge their forward requirements by buying futures contracts, and when they collectively conclude that the physical supply won’t be there, they bid the price up until either they secure the tonnage or drop out. In 2024 the International Cocoa Organization revised its estimated global cocoa deficit for the 2023-24 season to 494,000 tonnes, which was the largest annual shortfall the market had seen in more than 60 years, and which pushed the global stocks-to-grindings ratio to a 46-year low.
The manufacturers who were locked into supply contracts with retailers at fixed prices absorbed part of the increase; the rest passed through to shelf prices as chocolate bars either got smaller, got more expensive, or quietly replaced some of their cocoa content with vegetable fat and other extenders. The Ghanaian and Ivorian farmers who actually grew the cocoa saw almost none of the windfall, because farmgate prices in both countries are set by state marketing boards on annual cycles and had already been fixed before the international price ran.
What the aftermath tells us
By mid-2025 the international cocoa price had roughly halved from its peak, as Ghana’s 2024-25 harvest recovered to about 600,000 tonnes and the ICCO shifted from a deficit projection to a surplus of about 142,000 tonnes for the new season. The obvious reading of that is that the 2024 spike was a one-off, and that the market has now returned to something more like its long-run range. The less obvious reading is that a single bad season in two neighbouring countries with correlated weather was enough to triple the global price of a commodity in about a year, and that the underlying trend in the temperature of those two countries’ cocoa zones has been moving in one direction for a decade.
The next bad season is a matter of when rather than whether, and the market that priced this one has no structural way to spread the risk across a wider geographical base, because the geographical base doesn’t exist. There is only one place on the planet that produces cocoa at this scale, and it has one weather system.
