Ecuador’s Cocoa Boom Shows How Climate Change Is Redrawing Agriculture

Summary

Bloomberg's Scarlet Fu reports from cacao farms near Guayaquil on how climate change is redrawing global cocoa production. Extreme heat and erratic rainfall in West Africa, which supplies about 70% of the world's cocoa, caused a historic price spike in 2024, while Ecuador is rapidly expanding output as a key alternative supplier. Farmers, exporters and a chocolatier describe genetics, agroforestry and whole-fruit use as resilience tools, and Climate Central warns of more climate shocks ahead for global crops.

• Climate change is pushing West African cacao areas past optimal temperatures, adding roughly three weeks of above-optimal heat days per year.
• Cocoa prices spiked almost 80% past $12,000 a ton in the 2024 shortage and remain around $5,000 a ton, more than double three years ago.
• Ecuador's cocoa output is expected to reach 800,000 tons by 2030, potentially surpassing Ghana as the world's second-largest producer.
• Ecuadorian growers rely on the high-yield CCN-51 strain and shade-tree agroforestry to boost yields and limit disease.
• Ecuador's cocoa industry says it must keep investing in genetics as its own rainy and sunny seasons shift.
• Chocolatier Blue Stripes is pushing whole-cacao-fruit products as chocolate demand rises with the developing-world middle class.
• Climate Central expects continued climate change to deliver more shocks to global crops like the 2024 cocoa disruption.