The ivory coast is the largest cocoa supplier in the world. But there was a long droughts and thereby harvesting bad ones. The country is worried about its competitiveness.
Trees with thin trunks. Narrow, green leaves throw shadows on the floor. The sun burns, the air is damp and heavy. Large, oval fruits grow on the trees. Some are still green, others are already yellow and ripe.
Some still green, others already yellow and ripe: this is how healthy cocoa fruits look.
“We feel climate change here”
A cocoa pilingze near Agboville, a city in the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Augustin Koffi has been working here for eleven years. He reaps a mature cocoa fruit from the tree and hit it with a large knife. The cocoa beans inside are white, they smell sweet and fruity. But on the same tree, a little further up, small, dark brown fruits hang, shrink -like and dried.
Chocolate prices rise on the Ivory Coast due
The harvest is bad because it rained far too little in this and last year. “We feel climate change here,” says Koffi. “This has changed the weather very much. And that’s why it has become much more difficult to grow cocoa here.”
And then there is another problem here on the plantation: pests. They destroy the precious cocoa fruits. The shell looks moldy, the beans inside are brown and dried.
Pestglies destroy the cocoa fruits, the harvests fall out smaller.
The farmers have nothing of the high prices
A hard time for plantation owners Francois Koffi, an elderly gentleman who sits in the shade under a tree. Half of his harvest is lost. “The price of cocoa is currently good, even very good,” says the plantation owner. “But that doesn’t help us. Because it is solely because there are too little cocoa.”
Little cocoa beans, many chocolate fans: that drives up the price. A ton of cocoa currently costs the equivalent of almost 10,000 euros. The price has quadrupled over the course of two years. Expensive cocoa beans mean expensive chocolate.
The missed are a big problem for the Ivory Coast. Because the country is the largest cocoa producer in the world. Here cocoa beans are grown, harvested, dried and then exported – to France, Germany and Great Britain, to Belgium and Switzerland. In Europe, the cocoa beans are then roasted and processed into chocolate.
Plantation employee Augustin Koffi hopes that the Ivory Coast will remain number one.
View into an uncertain future
The future of the Ivory Coast as a cocoa bat is uncertain, says climate expert Traoré Bakary from the Ivorian environmental protection organization IDEF. For him, drought, pesticides and the clearing of rainforest are the main problems.
“When you look at this development, you can see that the rainforest is important for the cocoa trees because of the shading,” explains Bakary. “As soon as the plantations no longer give up enough and the climatic conditions become complicated, move to another area.”
The harvest continues on the plantation. With the big knife, Augustin Koffi beats the ripe fruits from the trees and collects them. As long as it is so dry here, the harvest remains bad, he says. And the prices for chocolate will remain high.
