According to a short report by Oxford Business Group, some 835,000 tonnes of cocoa were harvested in Ghana during the 2012/13 season, “about 21% of the global total”. Ghanaian cocoa production is expected to be “relatively stable for the 2013/14 season” at 830,000 tonnes. In the longer term, the Ghanaian government aims to boost production to 1 million tonnes on a sustained basis (the level achieved in the exceptional 2010/11 season).

The government’s efforts to boost cocoa production have included a number of initiatives, including a 3.4% increase in producer prices for the 2012/13 cocoa season, “despite international cocoa prices dropping”. As a result, the farmers now receive “78.4% of the free-on-board price, more than the 70% minimum that Ghanaian law mandates”.

The government has distributed some 20 million hybrid seeds to cocoa producers and has also revamped its services in support of cocoa farm rehabilitation, accelerating “the replacement of old trees” and initiating “mass pesticide spraying six times a year”. However, the mass pesticide programmes proved difficult to implement, resulting in irregular spraying, so the government is going to “phase out the spraying programme”. This decision has raised concerns over the vulnerability of smallholder cocoa farmers to pesticide fraud.

Low rainfall in the 2012/13 season held back government efforts to boost cocoa production, and additional challenges are faced from “an increased incidence of black pod disease”, which caused losses of 200,000 tonnes of cocoa in the 2012/13 season.

Public–private sector collaboration was initiated in June 2013 to “help improve efforts to eradicate the disease”, the scale of the problem in Ghana being such that “even an incremental improvement could have a significant impact on the entire sector.”

Disease outbreaks elsewhere in the current season have reduced cocoa production (e.g. Indonesian production is down 13,500 tonnes or 14% year on year), which has improved cocoa prices (cocoa futures prices rose almost 25% between August and November 2013) in the context of rising demand.

Worldwide, “processors have reported grinding more beans into cocoa powder in the third quarter of 2013 than a year earlier”, although the International Cocoa Organization is projecting “a global cocoa supply deficit of 70,000 tonnes for the 2013/14 season, following an estimated 52,000-tonne deficit for the 2012/13 season”.

A debate on the issue of cocoa pricing has recently emerged, with the Fairtrade Foundation maintaining that the low prices paid to cocoa farmers restrict production. Cocoa growers in West Africa reportedly earn “on average, about 6 percent of the final cost of a chocolate bar”.

Leading chocolate manufacturers Barry Callebaut argue that “simply paying African cocoa producers more will not incentivise them to move away from the encroaching, more lucrative industries of palm and rubber.” The company prefers an approach that teaches farmers “how to increase productivity and improve quality”, and pays premium prices for quality cocoa, since a lower quantity is then used in the chocolate production process. Barry Callebaut also encourages multicropping, which “may well make better business sense for the growers”.

Analysts at Euromonitor maintain that concerns over cocoa supplies hinge upon the ageing tree stock and also on the failure to attract young farmers into the sector.