How many tonnes of cocoa beans will the Ivory Coast produce in 2026?

TL;DR

My forecast is 2.01 million metric tonnes of cocoa beans for Côte d’Ivoire in calendar year 2026. The 10th–90th percentile range is 1.77–2.20 million tonnes, and the mean is 1.99 million tonnes. The 2025/26 rebound is real, but the calendar-year total is held down by the September/October–December 2026 start of the next crop, where El Niño, pod-count, fertilizer, and disease signals point lower.

Context

The question asks for January–December 2026 production, while the cocoa market mostly reports October–September crop years and Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial seasons were changed on February 27, 2026 so the main campaign runs from September 1 to February 28 and the small campaign from March 1 to August 31 (Government of Côte d’Ivoire, Feb. 27, 2026). That means the answer is a blend of the January–August 2026 tail of the 2025/26 crop and the September/October–December 2026 start of the 2026/27 crop, unless the resolver falls back to an ICCO crop-year proxy.

Côte d’Ivoire entered 2026 after a two-year production shock. USDA/FAS estimated Côte d’Ivoire’s October–September 2024/25 market-year cocoa production at 1.75 million metric tonnes and said the 2024/25 mid-crop was 500,000 tonnes versus a 10-year average of 550,000 tonnes, with weather, mold, poorer fermentation, and cocoa swollen shoot virus disease as constraints (USDA/FAS GAIN, Jan. 7, 2026). The current 2025/26 crop has recovered, but the next main crop is not locked in.

Evidence

The historical backbone is the FAOSTAT annual cocoa-bean production series as processed by Our World in Data. Units are metric tonnes of cocoa beans produced in the year; coverage is 1961–2024; sample size is 64 annual observations; the source vintage is FAO 2025 data archived by OWID on May 18, 2026 and retrieved on July 5, 2026 (OWID/FAOSTAT cocoa-bean production). The full series is below.

The base rate says 2026 should be near, but not fully back to, the 2017–2022 plateau. The FAOSTAT/OWID 2017–2022 average is 2.195 million tonnes, while the 2023–2024 average is 1.856 million tonnes (OWID/FAOSTAT cocoa-bean production). Côte d’Ivoire’s own 2025 economic table gives calendar-style cocoa production of 1,840,311.5 tonnes in 2025, down 2.7% from 1,890,774.9 tonnes in 2024, and the government’s DPBEP planning table lists cocoa production assumptions of 2.000 million tonnes for 2025, 2.050 million tonnes for 2026, 2.025 million tonnes for 2027, and 2.0137 million tonnes for 2028 (DGE 2025 economic situation PDF, DGBF DPBEP 2026–2028).

The official crop-year sources are lower than the calendar-year FAOSTAT table because they use different windows and estimation methods. ICCO’s 2024/25 annual report projected Côte d’Ivoire at 1.681 million tonnes for the 2024/25 cocoa year, only 0.4% above the prior stressed year, while USDA/FAS put the same market year at 1.750 million tonnes and the prior two market years at 2.300 million tonnes for 2022/23 and 1.760 million tonnes for 2023/24 (ICCO Annual Report 2024/25, USDA/FAS GAIN, Jan. 7, 2026). ICCO’s public May 29, 2026 bulletin revised the 2024/25 global cocoa surplus to 48,000 tonnes and world production to 4.723 million tonnes, but its free release did not give a current Côte d’Ivoire 2025/26 country estimate; it also warned that QBCS figures can be revised in later bulletins (ICCO May 2026 QBCS).

The live 2025/26 signal is bullish. On May 21, 2026, CCC director Yves Brahima Koné told Reuters that Côte d’Ivoire expected the 2025/26 crop, ending in September, to reach 2.0–2.1 million metric tonnes, up 10.5% from the prior season; the same report said arrivals at Abidjan and San Pedro were just over 1.7 million tonnes as of May 11, 2026 (Reuters via Zonebourse, May 21, 2026). A later market update put arrivals at 1.910 million tonnes as of June 28, 2026 since the season began on October 1, up 18.4% year on year (Trading Economics, June 29, 2026). That makes a weak 2025/26 crop-year outcome unlikely.

The late-2026 signal is weaker. The May 21 Reuters report said CCC field teams found pod-survival rates slightly below the same period last year, and three counters plus five farmers reported fewer pods and flowers after drought damage (Reuters via Zonebourse, May 21, 2026). WMO put the probability of El Niño conditions at 80% for June–August 2026 and around 90% for September–December 2026, while NOAA said in June 2026 that El Niño conditions were present and there was a 63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November–January (WMO statement, June 2, 2026, NOAA CPC ENSO discussion, June 2026). The IRI June 2026 update had El Niño probabilities at 100% from JJA through SON and said 13 of 24 models showed a very strong event in SON 2026 (IRI June 2026 Quick Look). A Reuters-reported HSAT survey on April 28, 2026 found that 73% of respondents in Nawa, Agnéby-Tiassa, and Sud-Comoé had not bought fertilizer for the next two production cycles, and Reuters reporting on June 22, 2026 said above-average rain and cloud cover were raising flooding, moisture, and disease fears in several cocoa zones (Reuters via WIFC, Apr. 28, 2026, Reuters via Zonebourse, June 22, 2026).

My calendar conversion is:

$$Y_{2026}=(C_{25/26}-P_{Oct-Dec,2025})+P_{Sep/Oct-Dec,2026}$$

Here $C_{25/26}$ is the full 2025/26 crop-year estimate, $P_{Oct-Dec,2025}$ is the part of that crop already counted in calendar 2025, and $P_{Sep/Oct-Dec,2026}$ is the start of the 2026/27 crop that falls in calendar 2026. I centered $C_{25/26}$ near 2.08 million tonnes because the CCC range was 2.0–2.1 million tonnes and late-June arrivals had already reached 1.910 million tonnes. I centered the late-2026 new-crop contribution below a normal clean-recovery case because the pod-count, ENSO, fertilizer, and heavy-rain/disease signals all point down.

The final distribution is a five-component mixture: 50% on a base calendar case centered at 2.01 million tonnes with a 110,000-tonne standard deviation; 22% on a weak-new-crop case centered at 1.84 million tonnes with a 140,000-tonne standard deviation; 16% on a strong-recovery case centered at 2.18 million tonnes with a 120,000-tonne standard deviation; 9% on a resolution/proxy case centered at 2.08 million tonnes with an 80,000-tonne standard deviation; and 3% on a severe weather/disease/source-error case centered at 1.60 million tonnes with a 120,000-tonne standard deviation. This gives a mean of 1.994 million tonnes, a median of 2.008 million tonnes, a 10th percentile of 1.766 million tonnes, and a 90th percentile of 2.198 million tonnes.

What's non-obvious

The obvious read is to take the CCC’s 2.0–2.1 million tonne 2025/26 crop-year statement and use 2.05 million tonnes. That is too high for a pure calendar-year reading because the strong 2025/26 main-crop flow began before January 2026, while calendar 2026 also includes the first months of the 2026/27 crop, exactly where the negative information is concentrated.

The other hidden issue is source definition. FAOSTAT is annual and best aligned with the question, while ICCO and USDA mostly use cocoa years or market years. If the resolver uses a 2025/26 ICCO-style proxy, the answer is more likely near 2.05–2.12 million tonnes; if the resolver uses a true calendar-year FAOSTAT/DGE-style value, the late-2026 crop-start risk pulls the center closer to 2.00 million tonnes.

Limitations

No public source I found gives a clean official January–December 2026 production forecast from ICCO, FAOSTAT, or USDA/FAS. ICCO’s public May 2026 bulletin gives world 2024/25 estimates and says the detailed QBCS contains annual and quarterly country data, but the country-level current-season tables are not fully public (ICCO May 2026 QBCS).

Port arrivals are a strong nowcast, not final production. They can move with old stocks, delayed commercialization, exporter timing, smuggling, quality rejection, and logistics. Weather from July through December 2026 still matters for the 2026/27 start, and the final resolved value can shift by tens of thousands of tonnes just from whether the source uses calendar-year production, sales-campaign data, or an ICCO crop-year proxy.