Every year, between April and August or September, Côte d’Ivoire faces a double reality: the short dry season that hits the climate, and the « petite traite, » its intermediate cocoa harvest. These two calendars line up almost perfectly, and the overlap has real economic consequences for the world’s top cocoa producer.
Côte d’Ivoire, which alone accounts for 35 to 40 percent of global cocoa production (more than 50 percent together with Ghana), runs two separate marketing campaigns each year. The main harvest, known as the « grande traite, » traditionally runs from October to March, during the long dry season marked by the harmattan wind. The mid-crop harvest, called the « petite traite, » runs from April to August or September depending on the year, a window that lines up almost exactly with the short dry season, the rainfall lull that hits the entire Gulf of Guinea coastline in the middle of summer.
That overlap is not trivial. Cocoa trees need steady water and stable conditions, and they struggle even with a modest drop in rainfall. That is exactly what happens every year during the mid-crop.
The lack of water during this dry spell tends to produce smaller pods and beans of generally lower quality than those from the main harvest. This is so well established in the industry that it gets baked directly into pricing. Historically, the price paid to farmers for the mid-crop has been structurally lower than for the main harvest, because of the discount applied for smaller beans caused by the season’s dryness.
To keep the mid-crop attractive for farmers despite this, the Ivorian government, through the Coffee and Cocoa Council, regularly adjusts guaranteed prices. In one recent example, the farm gate price for the mid-crop was set at 2,200 CFA francs per kilogram, against 1,800 CFA francs for the previous main harvest, a premium meant to offset, at least partly, the season’s built-in disadvantage.
Beyond quality, overall volume takes a hit too. The mid-crop traditionally accounts for a noticeably smaller share of the annual harvest than the main crop, a gap largely tied to this recurring water shortage. For the 2023/2024 season, the mid-crop was expected to come in between 400,000 and 450,000 tonnes, down from 550,000 tonnes the year before, a drop attributed at the time to the seasonal dry wind picking up during this period.
The short dry season is not the only factor at play. In recent years, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa sector has been facing a bigger challenge: climate change. Farmers in the Soubré region, in the southwest of the country, report dry spells now lasting three to four months straight, compared with one month at most in the past, a shift well beyond normal seasonal variation that has pushed some farmers to abandon their plantations altogether.
This makes managing the mid-crop trickier every year. The margin between a « normal » dry season and a prolonged, damaging drought keeps narrowing, making harvest forecasts harder to pin down for both the Coffee and Cocoa Council and international markets.
Aware of these pressures, Ivorian authorities have revised the official cocoa marketing calendar. Under a 2026 government decision, the main season now opens on September 1 and runs through the end of February, while the mid-crop starts March 1 and ends August 31, a one month shift from the previous calendar meant to smooth out sales and align more closely with Ghana, the world’s second largest producer.
Given how much weight Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana carry in global cocoa supply, any disruption to the mid-crop, whether purely seasonal or worsened by climate change, feeds straight through to international prices. Financial markets track rainfall in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa belt closely during this period, knowing that a weak mid-crop alone can shape the price of chocolate sold months later on the other side of the world.
