Economic Update for Cote d'Ivoire : Cacaoland - How to Transform Cote d'Ivoire
Cocoa is essential to Cote d’Ivoire. This sector mobilizes close to one million producers who provide income to five million persons (one-fifth of the country’s population) in order to meet 40 percent of global supply. Cocoa is also the country’s l...
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/898811564687854478/Executive-Summary http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32156 |
| Summary: | Cocoa is essential to Cote d’Ivoire.
This sector mobilizes close to one million producers who
provide income to five million persons (one-fifth of the
country’s population) in order to meet 40 percent of global
supply. Cocoa is also the country’s leading foreign exchange
earner and is among the sectors making the biggest
contribution to government revenue. In short, cocoa plays a
central role in Ivorian society and in the lives of many
families. However, despite its importance to the Ivorian
economy and society, the cocoa sector is not fully playing
its role as the engine of economic development. Some even go
so far as to cite the curse of “brown gold,” for at least
three reasons. First, more than half of producers live below
the poverty line—on less than CFAF 757 (roughly 1.2 US
Dollar) a day. Second, the price paid for the expansion of
cultivated areas in recent decades has been the destruction
of virtually all the country’s forests. Third, Côte d’Ivoire
has not yet managed to increase its share (between 5 and 7
percent) of the profit made along the cocoa-chocolate global
chain. Given this situation, it is not surprising that cocoa
is at the center of a host of economic policy discussions in
Côte d’Ivoire and that the Government has sped up its
deliberations aimed at improving the performance of the
sector, in particular through the Abidjan Declaration signed
jointly in 2018 by the Presidents of Côte d’Ivoire and
Ghana, which seeks to harmonize their policies and thus
maximize their profit (these two countries account for
approximately 65 percent of global production). After
analyzing the most recent trends in the Ivorian economy,
this ninth economic update for Côte d’Ivoire therefore
focuses on how the cocoa sector could support the structural
transformation of the country and, in so doing, promote
greater economic and social inclusion. |
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