Ivory Coast is tightening regulatory control over its three strategic agricultural sectors, cotton, cashew and, now, shea, which have been brought together since 2025 under a single regulator, the Cotton Cashew Shea Council (CCAK). Behind this institutional convergence lies a very concrete goal: putting an end to illegal practices that each year deprive the state and Ivorian producers of a substantial share of their income, backed up by heavy fines and the withdrawal of trading licenses.
The 2026 to 2027 shea season, launched on August 14, illustrates this drive to regain control. The CCAK set a floor price of 250 CFA francs per kilogram for well dried and sorted shea nuts at the farm gate, with tiers rising to 275 CFA francs at buyer storage and 305 CFA francs at the factory. A notable change is that shea nut purchases are now reserved exclusively for local processing units, and any land export of shea nuts and kernels abroad is formally banned, with transfers to factories not allowed to start until August 17 to give operators time to organize. The measure is meant to protect a sector that supports several thousand rural households, particularly the women who collect the nuts in the country’s north and center.
This push for tighter control is nothing new for cashew, where the leakage of raw cashew nuts to neighboring countries, Ghana chief among them, remains a persistent problem. Hundreds of tons of raw nuts slip out of official channels every year, a smuggling trade fueled by price gaps between Ivory Coast and its neighbors and by the failure, on the ground, to respect the farm gate price set by the government. The CCAK recently reminded operators, citing ordinance 2024 dash 886, that anyone violating the ban on land exports risks sanctions up to and including the withdrawal of their trading license, without prejudice to criminal prosecution, with the export ban itself in force since a 2013 decree.
The enforcement system goes beyond exports alone. A text adopted by the Council of Ministers toughened penalties for the illicit trading and export of agricultural products subject to authorization, with fines that can reach 50 million CFA francs and prison terms of two to ten years, covering even attempted violations. The measure targets a form of informal trafficking that involves both small time collectors and organized cross border smuggling networks.
On the cotton side, regulation takes a different shape but pursues the same goal of structuring the sector. Decrees introduced a mandatory authorization system issued by the CCAK for any export of cotton fiber, seed or by products, while cutting the export duty on raw cashew nuts from 7 percent to 5 percent of the CAF reference value. The government also created eighteen exclusive production and collection zones around ginning plants, handed over by contractual delegation to six major sector operators responsible for agricultural support and cotton seed purchasing in their areas.
These reforms come against a backdrop of uneven production. Cotton seed output jumped 47 percent in the 2023 to 2024 season to nearly 348,000 tons, while cashew production fell 42 percent in 2024 to around 1.1 million tons. For Ivorian authorities, the challenge now is to combine regulatory firmness with support for producers, in order to build, in the CCAK’s own words, sectors that are better organized, more competitive and that generate more value on Ivorian soil.