Cocoa Price Gap Between Ivory Coast and Ghana Widens Sharply for New Season
01 October 2026, Ghana: The two countries that together grow more than half the world’s cocoa have set sharply different farmgate prices for the 2026/27 season, with Côte d’Ivoire’s rate now running roughly 75 percent below Ghana’s, according to figures confirmed by both governments’ cocoa regulators this week.
Côte d’Ivoire’s Coffee-Cocoa Council set its new main-crop producer price at 1,200 CFA francs per kilogram, equivalent to roughly 2.07 dollars. Ghana’s regulator, COCOBOD, set its price at 42,400 Ghanaian cedis per tonne, equivalent to roughly 3.65 dollars per kilogram. The gap means Ivorian farmers are being paid substantially less for the same raw commodity than their counterparts across the border, even though both countries’ cocoa feeds the same global chocolate supply chain.
The Ivorian price also marks a steep cut from the country’s own prior season. According to data reported in early September, the new 1,200 CFA franc rate represents a 57 percent reduction from the 2,800 CFA francs per kilogram Ivorian farmers received for the 2025/26 main crop. More than 1.1 million registered cocoa producers in Côte d’Ivoire are affected by the change, and research cited alongside the announcement estimates that cocoa-farming households in the country derive an average of 67 percent of their income from bean sales, leaving little room to absorb the cut elsewhere.
Two Pricing Models, One Widening Gap
The divergence traces back to how each country calculates its guaranteed minimum price. Ghana operates under a legal framework that guarantees farmers at least 70 percent of the realized gross free-on-board value of the country’s cocoa exports. For the 2026/27 season, COCOBOD set that guaranteed share at 71.18 percent, among the higher levels in recent years.
Côte d’Ivoire uses a different formula, basing its minimum price on 60 percent of a cost-insurance-freight benchmark, with a floor of 50 percent permitted during periods of market volatility. The government has attributed this season’s lower price to what it has described as volatile international markets, combined with earlier forward sales commitments that locked in revenue at prices below where the broader cocoa market has since moved. Bruno Nabagné Koné, Côte d’Ivoire’s Minister of Agriculture, said the government’s responsibility was to set a price as high as possible based on the sales already completed by the Coffee-Cocoa Council, a framing that places the blame for the lower price on earlier forward-selling decisions rather than on the current formula itself.
Those forward sales were substantial. The Coffee-Cocoa Council sold more than 1.1 million tonnes of cocoa forward between March and June of this year, a period when global benchmark prices had already eased well off the record highs reached in December 2024. Locking in volume at those lower prices left less room to pass on any subsequent price recovery to farmers at the start of the new season, even as Ghana’s percentage-of-FOB-value model allowed its farmers to benefit more directly from stronger realized export prices.
Forward Sales Squeeze Ivorian Farmers
The practical effect is that two neighboring countries supplying the same global market have produced very different outcomes for their farmers this season, largely because of how exposed each pricing formula is to the timing of export sales versus the level of eventual export value realized. Ghana’s model ties farmer income more closely to what buyers ultimately pay for the crop; Côte d’Ivoire’s model, combined with its forward-selling strategy, has left farmers more exposed when the timing of sales and the direction of the broader market move against them.
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