Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Company expects the country to produce between 470,000 and 620,000 tonnes of cocoa in 2026/27, against roughly 760,000 tonnes a year earlier. That is a decline of 18% to 38%, and it sits below the 650,000 tonne figure Bloomberg reported last month. Managing director Wisdom Kofi Dogbey put the causes plainly: aging trees, persistent disease, and pollination failure that he said the country has not seen in 20 years. A strengthening El Nino, which usually brings drier conditions to the region, may curb yields further.
The farmgate picture pulls in opposite directions on either side of the border. Ivory Coast has held its fixed farmgate price at 1,200 CFA francs, around $2.12, per kilogram for the 2026/27 main crop, unchanged from the level it cut to in March. Ghana’s regulator has proposed raising its own price by about 6%, to 2,737 cedis per 64 kilogram bag, in line with its aim of giving farmers at least 70% of the free-on-board export cost. If approved, Ghanaian farmers would be paid roughly 75% more than Ivorian ones, which raises the risk of more Ivorian beans crossing the border. Cameroon is currently reported between 2,750 and 2,900 CFA francs per kilogram.
There is a second supply risk with a date attached. Ivorian traders, cooperatives and buying agents are struggling with the national traceability system introduced ahead of the EU deforestation regulation, which applies from 1 January 2027. From 1 September all cocoa purchases must use an electronic producer card, and exporters say cooperatives and field agents have not received the terminals, bags and seals they need. Ivory Coast produces about 40% of the world’s cocoa and sends around 70% of it to Europe, so slow purchasing there feeds into October and November deliveries. The Coffee and Cocoa Council says it has bought 20,000 new terminals and acknowledges the rollout is moving slowly.
None of that has settled the forecasts. A Bloomberg survey at the Cocoa Association of Asia conference in Singapore found six of nine attendees expecting a 2026/27 deficit, the largest around 400,000 tonnes, while others looked for a 200,000 tonne surplus and StoneX stayed broadly balanced. Guan Chong sees a 300,000 to 400,000 tonne deficit. Hedgepoint has the surplus shrinking to 111,000 tonnes from 325,000.
The market has taken the cautious side of all this. December cocoa futures in London fell 4.2% against 4 September and 10.9% against two weeks earlier, though they are still up 5.3% on the month, and Managed Money went back to a combined short of 21,700 lots across both exchanges. Vesper’s cocoa analysis, written by Martijn Bron, explains why that positioning matters more than the opinions attached to it.
