Establishing a farm
Most West African cocoa is grown on plots of two to four hectares by families who have farmed the same land for a generation or two. How a farm is set up decides its yield for the next thirty years, and most of the region's trees were set up at a time when nobody expected the price they now fetch.
Land and shade
Cocoa is an understorey tree. Farmers have historically established it by thinning forest and planting under the remaining canopy, which is why cocoa expansion and deforestation are the same story told twice. The alternative, planting under temporary shade — plantain, cassava, banana — with permanent shade trees interplanted, is what extension services recommend and what deforestation-free regulation now requires. Under a hot open sky a young cocoa tree dies; under too dense a canopy an old one yields nothing.
Planting material
Seedlings spend about six months in a nursery before transplanting at the start of the rains. Traditional Amelonado and hybrid varieties dominate West Africa; Ghana's Cocoa Research Institute distributes hybrid seed through COCOBOD's seedling programme, and Côte d'Ivoire's Mercedes hybrids bear earlier and heavier. Ecuador's CCN-51 clone is the outlier: high-yielding, disease-resistant and bland, it is the reason Ecuadorian output has doubled in a decade and the reason the country's fine-flavour Nacional growers resent it.
Standard spacing is around three metres by three, which gives about 1,100 trees to the hectare.
The productive life
| Age | State |
|---|---|
| Years 1–2 | Establishment; no fruit |
| Years 3–5 | First pods; yield rising |
| Years 8–25 | Peak bearing |
| Years 25–35 | Decline; more susceptible to disease |
| Beyond | Uneconomic without rehabilitation |
A great deal of Ghana's and Côte d'Ivoire's tree stock is now past peak, and the replanting rate has not kept up. A farm rehabilitated by cutting out and replanting loses three to five years of income from that land, which a family living on the crop cannot easily afford. This is the structural reason West African capacity is falling rather than the cyclical one, and it is why COCOBOD's rehabilitation programme matters more than any single season's weather.
Yields
The West African average is around 400–500 kg of dry beans per hectare per year. Well-managed farms with fertiliser, pruning and disease control reach a tonne or more; research plots exceed two. The gap between those numbers is the whole argument about whether the region's output can rise without more land — and, since 2020, whether it can rise at all under rules that make clearing new land unsaleable.
Inputs
Fertiliser, fungicide for black pod and insecticide for capsids are the three inputs that move yield. All are imported, all are priced in dollars, and in Ghana much of their distribution runs through COCOBOD's subsidised programmes. When those programmes are late or underfunded, yields fall a season later. It is one of the few input-side signals that leads the crop.