Ivory Coast’s cocoa regulator, the Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC), is planning to implement a major reform of the domestic cocoa marketing system within the next year. The goal of this reform is to eliminate middlemen in the supply chain, preventing risks and overpayment.
The reform will target the independent intermediary buyers who act as scouts and buyers, sourcing cocoa beans from farms in the hinterland and reselling them to exporters. According to the CCC, these intermediary buyers represent around 80% of the volumes purchased from farms and delivered in the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro, while cooperatives account for around 20% of the volumes in the world’s top cocoa producing nation.
The new system will rely on Ivory Coast’s new cocoa traceability and certification system that is being deployed by the CCC. This system will digitize all payment transactions for cocoa bean sales, from the farmer to the exporter. Arsene Dadie, the director of domestic marketing at the CCC who is leading the reform, stated that the intermediaries who collect the product to resell to other intermediaries “will disappear because they will not benefit from this system.”
The new system will essentially rely on cocoa cooperatives, which will be the only intermediaries between exporters and farmers. The CCC has already identified 1.05 million cocoa farmers and issued around 900,000 identification cards, of which 800,000 have been distributed. The regulator is also gradually rolling out the traceability system among the cooperatives, with the goal of ensuring that farmers are paid directly without any intermediary from the next cocoa season.
The CCC also aims to exclude intermediary scouts and buyers by reducing the number of permits issued to them and introducing more restrictions to eliminate those who fail to comply. According to the CCC, around 40,000 metric tons of beans are being hoarded in farm warehouses by independent intermediary buyers, who are delaying deliveries to ports and demanding higher prices.
The reform is expected to be fully operational by October 2024, at the start of the 2024/25 cocoa season. The CCC’s goal is to empower the cooperatives and eliminate the influence of the intermediary buyers, who currently control a significant portion of the cocoa purchasing in the country.