Better than gold: How Ecuador cashed in on surging cocoa prices
MILAGRO: In Ecuador, farmers who bet on cocoa beans rather than bananas, the country's top agricultural export, are cashing in as a global shortage of the main ingredient in chocolate feeds a price bonanza.
Cocoa is now a billion-dollar business in the Andean country, rivalling gold, copper and silver as well as the ubiquitous banana.
Near the Pacific port city of Guayaquil, in a region called Milagro (Miracle), 50-year-old farmer Cergio Lema can scarcely believe his luck.
A few years ago, the price of cocoa "was so low you could only earn enough for the upkeep of the farm," he told AFP as he strolled through his plantation, examining the oblong cocoa pods ripening on his trees.
But in the past two years, poor harvests linked to climate change and disease in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together account for over half of global cocoa output, have whipped global prices into a froth.
Lema's income has more than tripled -- from 100 dollars for a 100-kilo (220 pound) sack of the beans packed inside each pod, to 350 dollars per sack.
Nowadays he dreams about expansion.
"I have the vision of saving some money, taking out a loan, and buying another plot of land," he said.
In 2024, Ecuador's cocoa exports amounted to 3.6 billion dollars, 600 million dollars more than mining.
Between September 2024 and March 2025, the value of cocoa exports surpassed those of bananas, of which Ecuador is the world's top exporter, for the first time in six decades, according to the central bank.
Marco Vasquez used his bonanza to modernize his farm in Los Rios province, in the southwest of the country.
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