Cocoa Barometer 2025: record prices, record poverty

This 8 October, the VOICE Network, a broad coalition of civil society organisations including Rikolto, launched the Cocoa Barometer 2025. The Barometer lays bare the contradictions of today's cocoa sector: record prices on global markets, yet deepening poverty for those at the start of the chain. It traces decades of progress and setbacks and calls on all actors in the cocoa sector to take urgent, coordinated action.

As the Barometer paraphrases Max Roser of Our World in Data: "three things are true at once for the cocoa sector: it is in a bad place, it is in a lot better place than it was, and it can be a lot better still."

The cocoa sector: all-time highs and lows

Despite the current price boom, millions of cocoa farmers remain trapped in poverty. Crop failures, climate shocks, and unfair contracts mean that the profits from high prices rarely reach those who grow the beans. Farmer poverty, the Barometer stresses, lies at the root of nearly every major challenge in cocoa, from deforestation and child labour to gender inequality.

Meanwhile, cocoa-driven deforestation is expanding into new regions in Latin America and Central Africa, threatening biodiversity hotspots. Without careful management, the current boom could turn into a new cycle of oversupply and price collapse, echoing the 2016 crisis.

Cocoa growing communities remain under the tightening grip of climate change, deforestation, and human rights abuses. 1.5 million children remain in hazardous cocoa labour in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Women, who do most of the farm work, are still excluded from decision-making and profits.