Extreme weather is about to send the price of chocolate soaring
In his latest exclusive report from West Africa, Ian Packham gets to grips with a cocoa industry being ravaged by climate change, and the economic fallout from this rapidly emerging crisis.
Although native to the American tropics, it’s West Africa which has always dominated worldwide cocoa production. Chop up your favourite chocolate bar, and statistically 14% of its cocoa content will have originated in Ghana. It’s the world’s second-largest producer, exporting anywhere from 800,000 to 1million tonnes of beans annually. Cocoa is so important to Ghana’s economy a golden pod appears on current banknotes, including the 50 cedi [around £2.50].
Grown in Ghana’s seven most-southerly regions, where the climate mimics the crop’s transatlantic homeland, the country’s cocoa is largely tended by small-scale farmers reliant on rainfall for irrigation.
‘We use companion planting, with mango and banana for shade when the trees are mature, and cocoyam [a tuber whose leaves are also eaten] for the saplings. We never water mature trees,’ says our guide at Tetteh Quashie Cocoa Farm, the country’s first. Planted with cocoa pods smuggled from elsewhere in West Africa in the 1870s, it is just 0.38 of a hectare. The average cocoa farm today isn’t much larger, at 1.2 hectares.
According to the OPEC Fund for International Development, in 2022 800,000 people in Ghana earned their primary income from the cocoa industry, which contributed more to GDP than tourism. However, despite a joint initiative between Ghana and Ivory Coast, by far the largest producer in the world, to raise prices – wittily called COPEC by many, mimicking the OPEC oil cartel – prices remain volatile for a several reasons. This creates uncertainty for farmers without large bank balances to fall back on.
Since the 1950s, disease and pollutants have both taken their toll, while international demand also plays a significant role. As an example, prices paid by the government-run Cocoa Board in the second half of 2024 rose more than 58%, putting an extra £1,050 per tonne in people’s pockets, although it’s perhaps notable that there is a presidential election in December which could have influenced this. Nevertheless, the main reason the cost of your favourite chocolate bar is set to jump is climate change. A heat wave north of Ghana in March saw temperatures in Niger and Chad hit 47.2°C and 47.0°C respectively.
However, it was the southern Sahel, on Ghana’s northern border, where heat was most extreme. Scientists working with World Weather Attribution declared them “impossible” without human-induced climate change. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation records a mean temperature change of +1.3°C in West Africa since Ghana’s independence in 1957.
The new season’s leaves were withering on the mahogany and syringa trees of Mole National Park, whose human-animal conflict I will discuss in a further post, as well as on cocoa farms across the south, a fact relayed to me by another visitor to Mole ‘in agri’. ‘Should I be stocking up on chocolate then?’ I ask. ‘Probably’, comes the reply.
With over 50% of world cocoa stocks coming from Ghana and Ivory Coast, the decrease in a single season’s crop in these two neighbouring countries will invariably hit us on the supermarket shelves. It will also hit the income of Ghana’s farmers – some of the smallest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions.
According to The Climate Reality Project, founded by former Vice President Al Gore, Ghana lost $95m in revenue from drought in 2020, which could rise to $325million by 2050. Small streams, which subsistence farmers rely on to water their crops, have dried up entirely, destroying entire potential harvests. 35% of Ghana’s land is at risk of desertification according to a 2018 report by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
Startlingly, the World Bank states it would cost Ghana $2billion a year to put resilience projects such as rain storage infrastructure in place. That’s 2.7% of Ghana’s GDP, or 10% of everything agriculture brings in. It would also wipe out an emergency loan granted by the International Monetary Fund to ease an inflation crisis last year.
What’s more, according to Dr Jennifer Lalley, co-founder and co-director of non-profit the Natural Selection Conservation Trust: ‘climate change now competes with habitat loss as the main driver of species extinction.’ In many ways, climate change and habitat loss are concurrent problems. It’s now well-known that deforestation leads to run-off from soils, in turn worsening drought conditions as soils have no shade from the sun and lose their fertility quickly.
Beyond cacao, crops including maize and soya are being so badly affected that farmers in northern Ghana are leaving their ancestral homelands and heading to big cities such as Accra in search of alternative work. It’s not hard to find the youngest of them weaving between vehicles selling drinks, food, and small trinkets at major junctions across the city.
The International Organisation for Migration, a United Nations body, predicts as many as 216million people worldwide could become internal climate migrants by 2050. This status applies to those forced to move within their home country due to climate change. But is technology the answer? Well, it could be in part.
The University of Ghana has partnered with Rainforest Alliance and other groups on the SAT4Farming project, which has helped tens of thousands of the country’s cocoa farmers increase their harvests, and therefore their incomes, by providing growing advice based on satellite information for individual plots of land at a relevant scale to many of Ghana’s farmers. But, ultimately, we need to keep the pressure on politicians to meet their climate promises, while – I would argue – supporting Ghana’s small-scale farmers by eating as much chocolate as possible even as it rises in price.
More from Ian Packham in Ghana:
Seeing red: Ghana’s palm oil industry and sustainable futures
Images: Ian Packham