Last week, cocoa cultivators in Ghana and the Ivory Coast — which together produce more than 60% of the world’s choco-beans — agreed to set a minimum cocoa price of $2.6k per ton.
But, after spiking in a short sugar rush, cocoa prices are falling again as investors bet on consistent cocoa, Axios reports.
Can controls correct cocoa chaos?
Cocoa prices were consistently above $3k per ton between 2014 and 2016, but fell to $2.2k in March due to oversupply.
So Ghana and the Ivory Coast planned to use their massive market share to keep prices sweet — and prevent some of cocoa’s bitter problems.
The considerable conundrums of commodity cocoa
Consumers spend $100B on chocolate every year, but only $5B of that ends up in Africa — where ⅔ of that chocolate comes from.
This lack of cocoa cash results in reliance on child labor (the industry employs 1.6m children, some trafficked from other countries) and rock-bottom wages (most cocoa families live on less than $2 per day).
Proponents argue fixing prices could keep kids out of the fields.
But others argue that processing, not price, is more powerful, pointing to successes in Indonesia — which increased its proportion of value-added cocoa exports from <20% in 2010 to around 95% today.