What began as a golden windfall for Nigeria’s cocoa farmers at the dawn of 2025 has spiralled into a full-blown income shock, as benchmark global prices plunge by nearly 70 per cent from their historic highs — triggering fears of mass farm abandonment across the country’s cocoa belt.

Just months ago, global cocoa prices surged to almost $11,000 per ton, offering farmers the promise of long-awaited prosperity after years of volatile returns. Today, that optimism has evaporated. Prices have sunk below $4,000 per metric ton — a 2.5-year low that is rippling across the entire global cocoa supply chain and leaving producers scrambling for survival.

The downturn gathered pace this week as March ICE New York cocoa futures fell by 5.50 per cent, while London’s ICE contract dropped 3.22 per cent in a single trading session. For Nigeria — the world’s fifth-largest cocoa producer with an annual output estimated between 280,000 and 300,000 metric tons — the reversal has arrived with devastating speed.

Across West Africa’s cocoa belt, the impact is already being felt. Ghana last week cut its official farmgate cocoa price by 28.6 per cent to 41,392 cedis, roughly $3,764 per ton, for the remainder of the 2025/26 season in a bid to align domestic payments with weakened global benchmarks. Côte d’Ivoire is widely expected to follow, with authorities in Abidjan now reviewing the country’s fixed farmgate price of CFA2,800 per kilogramme.

At the annual meeting of the World Cocoa Foundation in Amsterdam this week, WCF President Chris Vincent admitted the scale of the crisis had kept senior officials from both Ghana and Ivory Coast away from the gathering. “The market volatility is placing a strain on farms and institutions in Ghana and Ivory Coast,” Vincent said. With both countries now recovering from earlier supply disruptions and global cocoa stocks replenishing, the market dynamic that once favoured Nigeria has reversed sharply — leaving local farmers exposed to the full force of international commodity cycles.

Research Director, Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria, Dr. Sam Orisajo, described the slump as a predictable consequence of shifting supply-and-demand fundamentals.

“When supply exceeds demand, the price of cocoa will drop, and if we check it very well, that is exactly what is actually happening right now — the same principle that drives crude oil prices,” he said.

Orisajo stressed that domestic pricing remains hostage to forces far beyond Nigeria’s borders. “The price fixing is not actually determined in Nigeria. It is based on international markets, and whatever happens in the international market determines the ripple effect that will come on Nigeria,” he explained.

According to him, cocoa prices had soared to the equivalent of ₦18 million per ton at the height of the surge after disease outbreaks crippled production in the world’s two dominant suppliers.

“Ghana was having a problem at that time — a cocoa swollen shoot virus — and the only cure was to uproot their cocoa trees. Because they couldn’t get cocoa from those two countries, Nigeria became the only place buyers could turn to for high-quality cocoa, and when demand outstrips supply, the price will go up. That is what actually created the price surge,” , he said.

But with production in both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire rebounding, the temporary imbalance has now swung in the opposite direction.

“Now that they have gotten over the initial shock and they have enough cocoa, we now have more supply,” Orisajo noted, urging farmers to remain calm. “Cocoa will go up and come down. This is the nature of the commodity. What farmers must understand is that these cycles are regular, and those who manage their resources well during the high periods will be better placed to weather the lows.”

Even so, anxiety is mounting among hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers across Ondo, Osun, Cross River and Edo states, whose livelihoods depend heavily on cocoa revenues.The Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria has warned that domestic production could fall by 11 per cent year-on-year to about 305,000 metric tons in the 2025/26 season — a decline that may offer marginal price support but does little to cushion the immediate cash-flow crisis. National President of the association, Adeola Adegoke, said farmers are increasingly frustrated by what they see as opaque global pricing mechanisms. “We must realise that the cocoa market has been managed by unknown forces at the international market — the London market — who determine cocoa prices without considering the investment in it, like inputs and labour costs, before arriving at the actual market price,” he said.

Adegoke warned that the consequences of inaction could be severe. “We are heading for serious problems, as our cocoa farmers have vowed to cut down their cocoa trees and replace them with other viable alternative crops or commodities if the downturn in cocoa prices continues and no assurances are given that their investment will be protected,” he said. According to him, such a move could permanently erode the nationa’s cocoa production capacity at a time when the sector is already weakened by ageing plantations, chronically low yields and intensifying climate variability.

Farmers and industry stakeholders are renewing calls for the reinstatement of a National Cocoa Management Board to regulate the sector and stabilise producer incomes.

“There has been a joint and sustained demand for the reintroduction of a Nigerian Cocoa Board to regulate the sector, coordinate development efforts, and drive Nigeria’s cocoa sustainability growth,” Adegoke said.