Cocoa’s stunning rise and its equally remarkable slump are beginning to shake up the longstanding way of doing business in West Africa, the region that supplies the bulk of the world’s beans.
A farmer attends to cocoa beans drying on a rack at a farm in Kwabeng, Ghana, on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. Issues across the West African cocoa belt that propelled prices to record highs this year remain far from fixed, meaning the price of beans that make chocolate isn't likely to decline back to the much lower levels that had previously prevailed.