How government hurts cocoa farmers

See Cocoa Farmers Uproot Their Plants Despite Record Prices by Alexandra Wexler of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"For a period, Ghana distributed fertilizer to cocoa farmers for free in an effort to boost yields. In 2020, the two nations formed a chocolate bloc to impose a premium on buyers of $400 per metric ton of cocoa, a surcharge they said would go directly into the pockets of farmers. None of it has worked.

“Basically Ghana and [Ivory Coast] treated the cocoa sector as kind of a given, just taking the foreign currency,” said Antonie Fountain, managing director of the Voice network, an association of civil society organizations working in sustainable cocoa. “We’ve been saying [for decades], ‘You’re going to have to pay a fair price to farmers, or else at some point, you’re going to run out of farmers’—which is kind of what’s happening now.”"

"Officials, farmers and analysts blame adverse weather in West Africa—wet weather in the dry season and dry weather in the traditional wet season—for much of the current production shortfall. However, West African neighbors Cameroon and Nigeria, which are tied as the world’s fourth-largest cocoa producers, have experienced similar weather and have seen their production increase in recent years.

Before the current production drop, farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana often raised output by cutting down forest to clear space for more cocoa trees. But a new European Union law aimed at protecting the world’s rainforest means that West African farmers have to try to grow more cocoa on the plots they have.

That decision often leads to big upfront costs because it essentially requires farmers to pull up older, less-productive trees and plant new ones to increase production, especially as farms are ravaged by diseases."