As the world’s leading cocoa producer, Ivory Coast has spent several months grappling with a marketing crisis that continues to strain its entire coffee and cocoa sector. The latest chapter, the announcement by the Coffee Cocoa Council that it has permanently ended its exceptional buyback program covering 100,000 tons of cocoa, illustrates on its own the persistent tensions between the regulator, producers and unions, in a context where the country is still working through the consequences of a decision made nearly a year ago.
To understand where this crisis began, one has to go back to the fall of 2025. Three weeks before the October 25 presidential election, President Alassane Ouattara announced a historic farm gate price of 2,800 CFA francs per kilogram for the 2025 to 2026 cocoa season. Presented at the time as a win for Ivorian producers, the announcement rested on world prices that were then at their peak, driven by unfavorable weather conditions and diseases such as black pod rot that had sharply reduced harvests across West Africa in 2024. International prices had reached as high as 10,000 dollars per ton on the New York and London markets, levels not seen in decades.
That price of 2,800 CFA francs was not arbitrary. It followed directly from the Ivorian marketing system put in place after the 2011 reform, under which the Coffee Cocoa Council had pre sold nearly 80 percent of the harvest at an average price of 4,149 CFA francs per kilogram, a mechanism meant to guarantee producers roughly 60 percent of that value. But markets never stay at their peak for long. The 2025 to 2026 season ultimately brought stronger harvests worldwide, pushing international prices down to around 6,000 to 7,000 dollars per ton, a drop of more than 30 percent from the 2024 highs.
For many international buyers, chocolate manufacturers and traders who had signed forward contracts at the earlier high prices, the situation quickly became untenable. Paying 8,000 or 9,000 dollars per ton while the market traded around 6,000 dollars represented a loss few could absorb. Many sought to renegotiate or simply cancel their contractual commitments outright, triggering a massive backlog on the Ivorian market, with entire tons of cocoa piling up in ports and warehouses awaiting buyers.
It was precisely to defuse this situation that the Coffee Cocoa Council, working alongside the Agricultural Interprofessional Organization, launched an exceptional buyback program covering 100,000 tons of cocoa. The stated goal was to absorb part of the stocks that had become unsellable on the international market under the originally set terms, while cushioning the economic shock for the producers affected. The Cocoa Defense Fund, created precisely to soften this kind of market shock, was also mobilized to support struggling exporters, while negotiations got underway with international buyers in the hope of finding a resolution acceptable to all sides.
On August 5 2026, the regulator officially announced the end of this exceptional program, stating that the operation had been carried through to completion. That account, however, is far from universally accepted within the industry. Several union organizations have disputed the announcement, pointing to persistent large volumes of unsold cocoa still sitting in cooperative warehouses across the country. A separate matter, involving a reported sum of 291 billion CFA francs tied to the management of the buyback program, has added further pressure on authorities, with some industry representatives, including Bilé Bilé, now calling on President Ouattara to make a strong gesture in favor of farmers.
Faced with the resurgence of these demands, particularly from certain cooperatives and union leaders still calling for cocoa buybacks at 2,800 CFA francs per kilogram, the Coffee Cocoa Council issued a firm rejection, describing the claims as baseless. According to the regulator, the volumes in question should have been sold through normal channels during the intermediate season, which opened in March and is due to close on August 31.
As the 2026 to 2027 season prepares to get underway in the coming weeks, the Coffee Cocoa Council is now calling on producers to focus on two major structural challenges facing the industry’s future: the rollout of the producer identification card, meant to better identify and secure participants across the supply chain, and compliance with the European Union’s deforestation regulation, which will impose stricter traceability requirements on all cocoa exports bound for the European market.
This crisis lays bare the structural vulnerability of an industry on which millions of Ivorians depend, caught between political commitments made at the peak of the world market and the inherent volatility of agricultural commodity prices, a challenge Ivory Coast has yet to fully master despite its dominant position accounting for more than 40 percent of global cocoa production.