Eco report – March 2026

Chocolate – this is very topical at Easter time. Hasn’t the price of chocolate become ridiculous? Have you also noticed that Cadbury’s (now owned by American company Mondelez) and some other brands are now substituting fabulous tasty dairy milk for unsavoury and environmentally damaging palm oil, and their cocoa content has dropped? Please look at the labels before you buy. Lidls and Aldi’s are using milk and have a high cocoa content.

We are led to believe that the price of chocolate has risen because of a world shortage. But, according to Reuters, Ivorian cocoa farmers are being forced to store unsold cocoa beans in their homes and accept low prices for their crops while global markets pretend there is a cocoa shortage and keep consumer prices artificially high. 700,000 tons of chocolate is sitting in warehouses rotting as multinational buyers/exporters have stopped buying, and are refusing to pay growers the government farm-safe price set by the regulator. The farmers have no means to sell to anyone else, so access to trade is a real problem and is causing poverty. The only way to break this is for countries to manufacture the chocolate themselves and sell it on the world market as a finished product, as Ghana (one of the world’s largest cocoa producers) has started doing. So, for example, instead of exporting cocoa beans for $2k per ton, it will export finished chocolate for $10k+ per ton. It will be interesting to see how this develops. 

Maria.