West Africa is meeting an ever larger share of the world's booming demand for chocolate, as other cocoa-growing regions in the Americas and Southeast Asia see crops stagnate and farmers move into other areas, Cargill's Africa director said.
In a Reuters interview at his office in Abidjan late on Monday, Lionel Soulard, director of Cargill's cocoa-focused Africa business, said the industry expected a small global surplus in 2017/18 - of about 100,000 to 150,000 tonnes. The global surplus was 370,000 tonnes in 2016/17, according to the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO).
Much of this excess has been on the back of an output boom in Ivory Coast. West Africa produces about two thirds of the world's cocoa; Ivory Coast, the biggest grower, one third. Ivory Coast has repeatedly broken records in the past five years, producing more than 2 million tonnes of cocoa in 2016/17, an increase of a third over the level half a decade earlier.
Arrivals in number-two producer Ghana in 2016/17 were just under a million tonnes. Some of that was smuggled from Ivory Coast, which unlike Ghana does not have a regulated cocoa price, and the amount was still just shy of its record 2010/11 crop.