Ghana Paid Cocoa Farmers 30% of the World Price

The world cocoa price quadrupled to $10,710 a tonne. Ghana's farmers were paid $3,100 - announced in cedis, months before the harvest, by the only legal buyer. Ghana's crop fell by more than half during the biggest cocoa rally on record. Disease, drought and old trees explain part of it. They do not explain why a price signal that should have pulled every extra pod out of the ground never reached the people holding the machetes. The Ghana Cocoa Board sets one farmgate price for the whole country and forward-sells up to 70% of the crop nine to twelve months early - so when the spike came, the season was already sold. We trace the gap out of Cocobod's own accounts: 333,000 tonnes of undelivered contracts rolled forward at $2,661, an all-in cost of $6,400 a tonne, and roughly nine and a half billion cedis of debt. Then the part that makes it a mechanism rather than a misfortune - 160,000 tonnes estimated to have crossed the border on trucks, chasing a neighbour's price 8% higher. Watch next: "Why Beef Hit $6.89 and Can't Come Down" #cocoa #economics #ghana Chapters: 0:00 Quadrupled and Falling 0:28 What This Video Walks Through 1:00 The Size of the Fall 1:32 The Honest Supply Story 2:28 The Response That Never Came 3:18 One Legal Buyer 4:13 Thirty Cents on the Dollar 4:42 Sold Before It Grew 5:25 Chasing Its Own Market 5:57 Contracts That Rolled Forward 6:56 A $6,400 Cost Base 7:26 Where the Loss Lives 8:14 Arbitrage Becomes Geography 8:34 160,000 Tonnes by Truck 9:13 Two Announcement Dates 9:51 The Case for Forward-Selling 10:19 When the Market Fell 11:05 The Shelf Paid Full Price 11:45 Announced, Not Discovered