Thousands switch careers to grow cocoa in Nigeria, drawn by high prices

TimesLIVE

06-05-2025

Growing up in Nigeria's cocoa farming area of Ikom in the southeast, Anyoghe Akwa did not see much of a future so he decided to move away, study civil engineering and carve out a career in the construction industry.
That was until 2023 when he heard cocoa prices were surging and farmers back home in Ikom were making a fortune.
'We saw 20-year-olds who never attended university generating a lot of money from cocoa farming, while those of us who were aspiring for a PhD were struggling,' said Akwa, 47, who had enrolled in a doctorate programme. 'So we started to come back and opened our own farms.'
Akwa is one of a cohort of new entrants to the sector, mostly men, who have switched to farming or other jobs to cash in on the cocoa price surge.
The Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria, which represents smallholder farmers, saw its membership increase by more than 10,000 in 2023-2024.
In Ikom, in Cross River State on the border with Cameroon, most farmlands are owned by the community. Under an ancestral custom, a person with family roots in the community can present a bottle of wine, an offering of food and a modest sum of about 5,000 naira (R56.85) to receive a plot of land.
Akwa had inherited farmland from his father and added more through community allocation so he could plant more cacao trees whose seeds are processed into cocoa and chocolate.
'Last year, I harvested four bags. I sold the first bag for 800,000 naira (R9,096) and the others between 1m (R11,369) and 1.2m naira (R13,634) per bag. It was a lot of money,' he said, noting that sale of just one bag matched his annual salary as a civil engineer.
At the top price, Akwa was selling cocoa for 20 times its value in 2022, when the price of one 64kg bag of beans was 60,000 naira (R682.46), according to local growers.
A drop in output from Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world's top two cocoa exporters which together account for 50% of global production, drove prices up from $2,200 (R40,182) — $2,500 (R45,662) per tonne in 2022 to nearly $11,000 (R200,926) in December 2024, according to the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO), an inter-governmental body.
The price surge coincided with Nigeria's worst economic crisis in more than three decades, with record numbers of people being plunged into poverty.
Those producing cocoa were largely protected and helped by a devaluation of the naira that made exports more competitive.
Growers are not the only beneficiaries. The cocoa business also involves factors, or middlemen between farmers and licensed buying agents (LBA), who warehouse the beans and sell on to exporters.
Ndubuisi Nwachukwu, 48, made the leap from banker to LBA in 2022, inspired by a business mentor. His timing turned out to be ideal.
'The income I've made these few years as an LBA, if you add up all the salary I earned as a banker, it is not up to it,' he said.
In Ikom and other cocoa-producing areas, the newly affluent cocoa beneficiaries are shaking up local economies and driving up housing costs.
Mark Bassey, 41, left a low-paying job as a medical laboratory scientist to become a grower in his ancestral home. As a boy, Bassey followed his mother to the cocoa plantation, so the skills were familiar to him. Like Akwa, he had wanted something different and had studied science at university, but he found it impossible to make a good wage.
'I know I will still go back into my profession because of my love for it, but for now I want to focus on farming,' said Bassey, adding he has quadrupled his income.
Nigeria is the world's fourth-largest cocoa producer, according to the ICCO, but its output of 315,000 tonnes was far behind its West African rivals Ivory Coast and Ghana, at 2,241,000 and 654,000 respectively.
The influx of new farmers, coupled with new cocoa strains that bear fruit within 18 months and government efforts to boost the sector by handing out free seedlings, should be driving up output, but this is not reflected in official statistics.
'Putting all these things together, by now we believe Nigeria's cocoa production level would have doubled,' said Rasheed Adedeji, director of research and strategy at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN).
One reason is a significant proportion of Nigerian cocoa beans, about 200,000 tonnes a year, are smuggled out of the country, he said.
The CRIN has received more than 500,000 requests for new cocoa seedlings so far this year, enough to cover 400,000ha of farmland, triple the demand seen in the same period last year.
Still, some of the new growers are hedging their bets. Akwa shuttles between his farm and various construction sites where he still directs teams of workers and foremen.
'I don't sleep because I have to keep calling them to see if they have done this or that,' he said. But if prices hold, he sees a long-term future in cocoa. 'With what I'm seeing, it's possible that I would switch to cocoa farming full-time.'