Climate change is disrupting cocoa production, driving up global chocolate prices and threatening the mostly poor farmers who cultivate it — and it’s about to get worse. Major cocoa processing facilities in Ghana and Ivory Coast have cut production because they cannot afford to purchase raw cocoa beans, Reuters reported last week. According to the International Cocoa Organization, prices were more than 2.5 times higher than they were last year, leaving producers with dwindling cocoa stock with which to produce chocolate.
Approximately two-thirds of the world’s cocoa is grown in Ivory Coast and Ghana, where heavy rains exacerbated the spread of black pod disease and swollen shoot virus. “A major crisis is underway in the cocoa sector and any kind of surplus that might have existed in the sector has gone,” as the industry enters a fourth year of a supply deficit, Tedd George, of Kleos Advisory, a businesses consultancy firm, told Axios. “With climate change, it’s going to be impossible to continue.” (Reuters, Axios, ManufacturingDive, CBC; Commentary: South China Morning Post, David Dodwell op-ed)