The price of chocolate bars has shot up across the world over the past year, meaning they can feel like a luxury – yet West Africa’s cocoa farmers have not been reaping the benefit. In fact, many are in a desperate state as they have not been paid for months. “My husband fell sick, and I couldn’t get money to take him to the hospital.
So he died at home,” 52-year-old Ghanaian cocoa farmer Akosua Frimpong told the BBC. Following a surge in the cost of cocoa – the main ingredient of chocolate – in 2024, prices have since crashed. Much of the world’s cocoa is produced in Ghana and Ivory Coast, where state regulators set the price a year in advance.
The recent collapse in prices has made their beans around 40% more expensive than international traders are willing to pay. Prices have fallen for a variety of reasons, partly because a good harvest around the world came at a time of lower demand. Because of the previous high prices, chocolate bars have become smaller and chocolate makers have been using less cocoa.
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The knock-on effect should mean that chocolate bars will eventually be less expensive, but it has left the cocoa industry in Ghana and Ivory Coast in a mess. Even when prices were high, West Africa’s cocoa farmers felt they were not benefiting from the world’s chocoholics. Their farms are in remote areas deep in the jungle with poor infrastructure – they live in villages where there is little access to electricity or running water.
The bright sunshine could not dissipate the heavy atmosphere of grief that loomed over the village of Suhenso in western Ghana when we visited last month. Mourners squeezed into Frimpong’s home to pay their respects to her husband Malik Boahen, who had died earlier in February after his neck began to swell up.
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