Ivory Coast’s cocoa regulator plans to implement a reform of the domestic cocoa marketing system that will, within a year, eliminate middlemen to prevent risk and overpayment, an official and sources told Reuters. The reform will target intermediaries who act as scouts and buyers, sourcing cocoa beans from farms in the hinterland and reselling to exporters. According to the Coffee and Cocoa Council (CCC) regulator, independent 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 volumes in the world’s top cocoa producing nation.
The reform will rely on Ivory Coast’s new cocoa traceability and certification system that is being deployed by the CCC, and will be operational by October at the start of the 2024/25 cocoa season. The system will digitise payment for all cocoa bean sales or purchase transactions from the farmer to the exporter. “The intermediaries who collect the product to resell to other intermediaries will disappear because they will not benefit from this system,” Arsene Dadie, director of domestic marketing at the CCC, who is leading the reform, told Reuters.
Dadie said the new system based on the farmers identification cards, which also serve as payment cards, will essentially rely on cocoa cooperatives that will be the only intermediaries between exporters and farmers. The CCC has identified 1.05mn cocoa farmers, and issued around .