the cocoa market | France

1.1 Cocoa occupies third place in the world commodity market

Cocoa is the powder obtained after an operation of crushing the cocoa beans, fruit of the cocoa tree. The cocoa industry is divided very clearly between :

• The upstream part which consists of the exploitation of cocoa plantations and the recovery of cocoa beans, drying. This upstream primary industry is the quasi-monopoly of developing countries;
• The primary swallowing part which consists of the transformation of the raw bean into "cocoa mass", a semi-finished product used by the entire chocolate industry (cleaning, drying, roasting, hulling and grinding) which sometimes takes place directly on the production site but which is much more often the prerogative of Western multinationals;
• The secondary swallowing part which consists of the production of chocolate and other by-products that are ultimately distributed to final consumers. These secondary and tertiary activities are largely concentrated in developed countries;

Between these key segments of the cocoa value chain, there is of course the transport industry, particularly maritime transport, which links the different geographies involved.

The world cocoa market is a globalized marketplace with a typical functioning of commodity markets.

The production part is largely concentrated in Africa since Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana alone account for more than 60% of world cocoa production amounting to over 4 billion tons . Other key countries in global production are other African countries, South American countries and Indonesia. It should be noted that 80% of world production comes from family plantations less than 10 hectares.

On the downstream side of the industry, europe and the american continent account for a preponderant share of global processing and consumption. It should also be noted here that a few Western multinationals control a substantial part of the world market for the final product. It should be stressed that this globalised raw material market is largely characterised by the impact of financial markets since world prices for physical exchanges and futures contracts for cocoa are set on the London and New York markets.

In France the chocolate industry represents approximately 400,000 tons for several billion euros in turnover and tens of thousands of direct jobs.