Ghanaian cocoa farmers anticipate a record yield in the 2025–2026 growing season
Ghana is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world. Farmers there are looking forward to a big crop this coming season (2025–2026) because flowering and pod development have improved. However, they are still having trouble getting the inputs they need and the weather is being unpredictable.
In previous seasons, the West African country’s output dropped because of things like diseases, climate change, and a lot of illegal gold mining, which hurts cocoa farms and lowers yields.
Growers are cautiously hopeful about the next season, though, saying that better weather and fewer diseases should help them make more crops.
“Farmers who have worked hard on their cocoa farms will definitely have a great harvest this year,” said Theophilus Tamakloe, a farmer who grows cocoa and is vice president of a national farmers’ group.
Tamakloe, who farms in Ghana’s Assin North area, said, “We are seeing a lot of improvement compared to last year in terms of flowers, pods, and leaf health.”
From 230 bags of cocoa last season, Tamakloe thinks that the future harvest will bring 350 bags. But he worried that too much rain and the fact that Ghana’s cocoa regulator, COCOBOD, wasn’t distributing fungicides on time could hurt yields.
In an interview with Reuters, Salomey Saah, another farmer, agreed with Tamakloe that things were looking up, but he also had similar worries about how to get rid of pests.
“I treated my cocoa farm like a business this year, and I have seen huge gains.” “I want to harvest about 2,000 bags, which is more than the 1,000 bags I got in 2024/2025,” Saah, who farms in the central-western Tano area, said.
But she warned that bugs could kill all the crops in just three days if there were no pesticides.
Last season, Kwame Alex made more than 2,000 bags of cocoa. In 2024, he was named the National Best Cocoa Farmer. Alex has even bigger plans. He told Reuters that he wants to sell 3,000 bags next season.
A request for information from COCOBOD did not get a response right away. The regulator hasn’t said what the output goal is for the new season, which starts in August.
In May, COCOBOD data showed that Ghana was likely to fall short of its yield goal of 650,000 metric tons for the 2024–2025 season.
It is projected that the West African country will only produce 590,000 tons this season.
Over 60% of the world’s cocoa comes from Ghana and its neighbor, Ivory Coast. However, their harvests have been the worst in decades.
