The world grinds about 4.6 million tonnes of cocoa a year
Chocolate factories around the world ground about 4.6 million tonnes of cocoa beans in the 2024/25 season, according to the International Cocoa Organization1. That is about 146 kilograms of cocoa beans every second, turned into chocolate, cocoa powder and cocoa butter.
Nobody measures how much chocolate the world eats, because a chocolate bar contains sugar, milk and other ingredients as well as cocoa, in very different amounts. The beans ground in factories are the best measure of how much cocoa the world uses.
Child labour on West Africa’s cocoa farms
Much of the world’s cocoa comes from small family farms in West Africa, above all in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, and on many of those farms children do part of the work. A large survey for the US Department of Labor found that around 1.56 million children were in child labour on cocoa farms in the two countries in 2018/19, about 790,000 in Côte d’Ivoire and 770,000 in Ghana2.
That's how many children were working on cocoa farms in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana in conditions classed as child labour
Almost all of them, 95%, were doing work classed as hazardous2. Poverty is widely seen as the root cause: when cocoa sells for too little to pay adult workers, families rely on their children.
Chocolate’s heavy footprint
Chocolate has one of the largest environmental footprints of any common food. A kilogram of dark chocolate comes with about 46.7 kilograms of greenhouse gases, more than coffee and almost five times as much as chicken, though still less than beef3. It also takes about 69 square metres of land to produce a kilogram of dark chocolate, three times as much as coffee4.
Much of that footprint comes from the land itself, since cocoa grows in the tropics where new farms can mean cleared forest. The European Union’s law on deforestation-free products now covers cocoa, requiring chocolate makers selling in the EU to prove their cocoa was not grown on land cleared after 20206.
The year cocoa prices hit records
In 2024, cocoa suddenly became one of the most expensive crops in the world. Prices on the commodity markets passed 12,000 US dollars a tonne, a record, after harvests failed in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana because of drought, irregular rain and plant disease5. World production fell to 4.37 million tonnes in 2023/241.
The crisis showed how fragile the supply is when so much of the world’s cocoa comes from one small region. Production recovered by 7.6% in 2024/25, to 4.7 million tonnes, and the International Cocoa Organization notes that the high prices encouraged farmers to reinvest in their farms1. Factories, facing expensive beans, ground 4.3% less cocoa1.
What fair trade changes
Fair trade certification tries to address the root cause: the low price farmers receive. Fairtrade cocoa is sold with a guaranteed minimum price, which from October 2026 rises to 3,500 US dollars a tonne in Ghana and 3,200 euros in Côte d’Ivoire, plus an extra payment, the Fairtrade Premium, of 275 dollars a tonne that farming cooperatives can spend on their communities7. Fairtrade’s standards also prohibit child labour as the International Labour Organization defines it8.
Fair trade does not solve everything. Only part of the world’s cocoa is certified, and investigations have found child labour even on Fairtrade-certified farms9. But for shoppers, it is one of the few ways to choose chocolate with a better chance of having been grown by paid adults rather than children.
Where chocolate is heading
Two forces will shape the next decade of chocolate. The first is climate. West Africa’s harvest failure in 2024 was a warning of what more extreme weather can do to a crop grown in such a small area, and more frequent droughts would make supply shocks more likely. The second is regulation. The EU’s deforestation law, and growing pressure on chocolate companies to trace their cocoa back to the farm, could make it much harder to sell cocoa grown on cleared forest or by children.
If those rules work, chocolate may become more expensive, but also fairer to the people who grow it. The 2024 price spike showed how much the world depends on a few million cocoa farmers in West Africa, and how little slack there is when their harvests fail.
The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.
