Cocoa Barometer 2025 warns West African farmers remain in poverty despite soaring global cocoa prices, urges systemic reforms

The 2025 Cocoa Barometer has highlighted ongoing challenges in the cocoa sector, revealing that millions of smallholder farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria remain trapped in poverty despite record-high global cocoa prices. The report, signed by Nana Yaw Reuben and shared with the Ghana News Agency in Accra, points to market volatility, climate shocks, governance gaps, and human rights issues as key drivers of instability in West Africa‘s cocoa industry.

“Three things are happening simultaneously in the cocoa sector: it is bad, it is better than before, and there is a lot of room for improvement,” the Barometer stated. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana produce over 60 per cent of the world’s cocoa, while Nigeria is emerging as a major producer, expected to yield 350,000 tonnes in the 2024/25 season. Yet, most farmers have not benefited from the recent price surge due to forward-selling mechanisms delaying price increases and declining yields caused by ageing trees, crop diseases, and erratic rainfall linked to climate change.

The Barometer underscored that farmer poverty underpins many sectoral issues, including deforestation, child labour, and gender inequality. Approximately 1.5 million children continue to work in hazardous conditions in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, while women, who perform the majority of farm labour, remain largely excluded from decision-making and profit-sharing. Farm workers and tenant farmers, critical to cocoa cultivation, are often overlooked despite their vulnerability.

High cocoa prices are driving increased production, but deforestation is spreading to new regions in West Africa, raising concerns that oversupply may soon depress prices as experienced in 2016. Weak governance, limited supply management, and lack of transparency in farmgate pricing were cited as key factors exacerbating the sector’s fragility.

Despite these challenges, the Cocoa Barometer emphasised that systemic change is possible through collaboration among farmers, governments, companies, and civil society. It called for urgent action, including fair pay to ensure a living income for farmers, protection of forests through a global deforestation moratorium, recognition of farmers—both women and men—as co-decision makers, and the implementation of transparency and accountability mechanisms across the supply chain.

The Cocoa Barometer, a state-of-sustainability overview published by a consortium of civil society organisations, provides a comprehensive assessment of the sector, highlighting current challenges, tracking progress, and outlining potential future developments and emerging risks.