Browsing: African Cocoa

• Bittersweet consequences. Global chocolate value chains are fueling desertification across West Africa, a new report says. 
• As chocolate demand soars, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans is paying a huge price with 80 percent of its forest cover lost.
• Corruption fueling illegal logging and deforestation of rainforests for cocoa farms

The raw material needed to make chocolate is cocoa beans, but West Africa, which produces 40 percent of the world’s produce, is destroying its rainforests at an unprecedented pace to feed global demand.

Already, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans has lost 80 percent of its forest cover over in just sic decades, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports.

FAO’s Transparency, Traceability and Deforestation survey in the Ivorian cocoa supply belt shows that the unmonitored value chain of chocolate is leaving populations vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change.

Chocolate demand rising globally

• Cocoa is a signature cash-crop for Ivory Coast
• US Department of Agriculture slated to invest $61 million in Ivory Coast cashew nut
• Ivory Coast economy is forecasted to expand by 6.7 percent in 2022

Ivory Coast is one of Africa’s largest farms.  More than 60 per cent of the national territory is dedicated as arable agricultural land. Ivory Coast is one of the largest economies in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, and agriculture is its backbone.  Cocoa production is the blood pumping through the economic veins of the Ivory Coast. The West African nation is not only the largest producer of Cocoa in the region but globally (contributing around 30 per cent).  

In 2020/2021, Ivory Coast produced 2.15 million metric tonnes of cocoa beans. In Ivory Coast, the share of agriculture to the economy stood at 21.39 per cent in 2020.     

The West African nation of more …