Published on : 19/05/2022 – 00:55
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire announce a transparency operation on the price of cocoa, to provoke a start from the side of the multinationals.
Ambition was not enough. This is the observation of representatives of the Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa sectors.
The initial desire was to pay the producers better and to compensate for the permanent fluctuation of prices on the market, through the participation of multinationals which grind and sell the beans to chocolate makers. This resulted in the introduction of what is known as the Decent Income Differential (DRD), better known as LID, in English: a premium of 400 euros per ton paid by cocoa grinders and supposed to added to the world market price.
But three years after the establishment of this mechanism, the results are not good. ” What was given with one hand was taken with the other “Summarizes a player in the sector. Since the multinationals agreed to pay the 400 dollars, the country premium, which is another component of the price, has collapsed. Beans of this origin have lost between 500 and 600 dollars since the launch of the DRD, as if Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa had seen their reputation tarnished.
The double discourse of industrialists
As a result, the 400 dollars supposed to support cocoa farmers have been in a way “neutralised”. ” We cannot claim to want to support the planter’s resale and contribute to such a drop in the country premium points out Alex Assanvo, executive secretary of the Cocoa Initiative Ghana Côte d’Ivoire.
In response, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have decided to publish each month the amount of the country premium allocated to Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa, which represent 60% of world production. A way to remind everyone of the reality of prices, also to tarnish, without saying so, the communication of industrialists who constantly highlight their action in favor of a more sustainable sector.
The authorities are laying the groundwork for future negotiations
It is also a way for the producing countries to put themselves in battle order at a key period: it is between July and September that contracts are negotiated between producers and industrialists precisely, for the next cocoa campaign which begins in October.
Producers who hope that slightly higher prices will firm up further. Even if, as Michel Arrion, Executive Director of ICCO, the International Cocoa Organization, reminds us, ” prices have little chance of increasing as long as the cocoa sector is structurally in surplus. »