There is a sloganeering tale that “cocoa farmers cannot afford a bar of chocolate.” It is mostly true. Chocolate is cultivated overwhelmingly in West Africa, and most workers in this labour-intensive farming earn less than $2 a day.
Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire, which produce around 75% of the world’s cocoa, may finally be trying to change this narrative. On Tuesday, 14 July, the four countries met in Abuja to form the Cocoa Value Addition Alliance, aimed at ending the export of raw cocoa beans and building local processing capacity instead. The summit was undoubtedly connected to recent volatility in the international cocoa market. Global prices moved from record highs of more than $11,000 per metric tonne to about $3,000, then recovered to around $5,000 within eighteen months.
But the trouble with the cocoa industry runs deeper than recent price swings. It is rooted in the exploitative nature of what can only be called a colonial crop. Cocoa feeds industries worth far more than the raw material producers ever see. The global chocolate industry is valued at between $130 billion and $165 billion, yet according to an Oxfam report, for a standard milk chocolate bar sold in Germany, supermarkets capture about 42% of the value, chocolate manufacturers take 26%, and cocoa farmers receive less than 9%.
History of Cocoa-Chocolate Dilemma
To understand how we arrived here, we have to look at the long historical relationship between cocoa farming in West Africa and chocolate consumption in the West. The cocoa-chocolate dilemma is itself an expression of slavery, cheap labour, and exploitation. When the Portuguese found cocoa in South America, they brought it to Europe, where consumption spread quickly. After several failed attempts to commodify the plant, it was a Briton, Joseph Fry, who finally won European hearts with a mix of cocoa, sugar, and butter. That would later become the modern chocolate bar.
To satisfy European demand for this product, more cocoa had to be planted. But the plant grows only in a hot, humid climate found in a narrow band around the equator. So Europe cultivated its appetite in the very lands it was colonising.
The Portuguese were quick to recognise the suitability of the West African island of São Tomé. They imported Angolans, from a country they were also colonising, to farm the crop. The profits were immense, built on the systematic enslavement of workers, even after Europe had formally agreed to end slavery. It was precisely this ethical contradiction that pushed the English company Cadbury to look elsewhere, leading it to what would become the true heartland of cocoa — the English colony of Ghana and its neighbours.
Cocoa has been cultivated in these countries for more than a century, but the mindset that comes with colonial cash crops — quick money for exporters, minimal investment in technology — has kept these countries dependent on selling raw beans directly to large European and American corporations. Competing with these mafia-like corporations has never been easy for local producers.
For generations, West African men, women, and children have laboured so that Westerners could enjoy quality chocolate. The irony is that when Western corporations finally export chocolate bars and drinks back to Africa, what comes back is everything but cocoa, as the products are bulked up with sugar, fillers, and additives.
Challenges of the New Alliance
So will this new alliance between three West African nations and Cameroon yield anything productive for their economies? Producing chocolate locally is undeniably the better economic path, but several obstacles must be confronted first.
First, are these countries arriving too late to the “bean to brand” transition? Ghana built its early development on cocoa. In Côte d’Ivoire, a cocoa farmer once became a pro-French president. Nigeria’s first skyscraper was named Cocoa House. Yet across the decades, no serious plan emerged to localise production and branding. Only in recent years have these countries begun building processing plants, and even now, far below the capacity required.
Frustrated by price volatility, some major producers are already searching for alternatives to cocoa altogether. Earlier this year, Nestlé adopted ChoViva, a cocoa-free chocolate substitute, for its Choco Crossies. Other brands are quietly reducing chocolate content in their products and abandoning chocolate labelling entirely. Their loyalty, in the end, is to profit, not to the crop.
A second threat to the initiative is sabotage, from politicians and businessmen unwilling to lose their cut. A Financial Times report from August 2025 documented cartels in Côte d’Ivoire smuggling cocoa beans across borders to evade government regulation. If this level of sabotage is possible even during raw bean export, it is almost certain that large corporations will find ways to assist further sabotage once processing begins.
Nigeria has already seen this pattern play out in the oil sector. When Dangote built the country’s first privately owned refinery, after decades of dysfunctional state-owned ones, he faced sustained resistance from government officials, international competitors, and even his own staff. As local cocoa processing scales up, similar mafias are likely to emerge around it.
Financing presents its own danger. Nigeria’s Bank of Industry has announced it will roll out loans from the European Investment Bank. But as with so many loans of this kind, the real question is whether foreign interest payments are structured to strengthen the industry or quietly undermine it. And will political actors simply trade this money among themselves?
If these structural issues are not confronted directly, the entire “bean to brand” vision risks becoming a facade, another decade lost while the colonial legacy of the cocoa-chocolate dilemma remains fully intact.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
0 Comment