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

Côte d’Ivoire is coming out of two weak cocoa seasons, not entering a normal one. The best current regulator-linked number is the CCC’s 2025/26 crop-year estimate of 2.0–2.1 million metric tonnes, reported by Reuters on May 21, 2026, after arrivals at Abidjan and San Pedro had passed 1.7 million tonnes by May 11 (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026). That is a clear upgrade from the older March 2026 Reuters trader-and-analyst consensus of 1.8 million tonnes for the same crop year (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026).

The resolution problem is that the question asks for calendar year 2026, while ICCO and USDA usually report cocoa years or market years. FAOSTAT reports annual “amount produced in the year” data in tonnes, while USDA’s Côte d’Ivoire cocoa table uses a market year beginning in October and ICCO’s public bulletins use cocoa-year balances (OWID/FAOSTAT metadata, USDA/FAS GAIN IV2025-0015, ICCO May 2026 QBCS summary). I therefore treat 2026 as a mixture of a likely FAOSTAT-style annual value, a possible 2025/26 crop-year proxy, and a true calendar conversion that includes the late-2026 start of the 2026/27 crop.

The historical backbone is FAOSTAT as republished by Our World in Data. The series is metric tonnes of cocoa beans produced in the year, covers 1961–2024, has 64 annual observations, and the OWID copy was updated from FAOSTAT on February 25, 2026 (OWID/FAOSTAT). It shows a modern plateau near 2.1–2.3 million tonnes from 2017 to 2022, then a drop to 1.822 million tonnes in 2023 and 1.890 million tonnes in 2024 (OWID/FAOSTAT).

The official annual planning anchor is close to the current-crop evidence. Côte d’Ivoire’s DPBEP 2026–2028 projection table lists cocoa production in thousands of tonnes at 2,358.8 in 2022, 1,822.3 in 2023, 1,890.4 in 2024, 2,000.0 in 2025, and 2,050.0 in 2026, with the table sourced to MEPD-Anstat/DGE-DPPSE (DGBF/MEPD DPBEP 2026–2028). That is a projection, not a final crop statistic, but it lines up with the CCC’s May 2026 2.0–2.1 million tonne crop-year guidance (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026).

Crop-year sources confirm the slump and the partial recovery. USDA/FAS reported Côte d’Ivoire cocoa bean production at 2.300 million tonnes in MY 2022/23, 1.760 million tonnes in MY 2023/24, and 1.750 million tonnes in MY 2024/25, with MY 2024/25 harvested area at 4.464 million hectares and yield at 0.39 tonnes per hectare (USDA/FAS GAIN IV2025-0015). ICCO’s 2024/25 annual report put Côte d’Ivoire lower, at 1.681 million tonnes, and projected global 2024/25 cocoa production at 4.698 million tonnes (ICCO Annual Report 2024/25). ICCO’s May 29, 2026 public bulletin then revised the global 2024/25 balance to 4.723 million tonnes of production, 4.628 million tonnes of grindings, and a 48,000-tonne surplus, but the free public summary did not provide a 2025/26 Côte d’Ivoire country line (ICCO May 2026 QBCS summary).

The live 2025/26 arrivals evidence is stronger than it looked early in the year. The CCC said arrivals at Abidjan and San Pedro were just over 1.7 million tonnes as of May 11, 2026, and Vesper later reported 1.822 million tonnes of arrivals by June 7, 2026, 11% ahead of the same point last season (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026, Vesper, June 11 2026). That supports a 2025/26 crop near the CCC range, not the stale 1.8 million tonne March consensus (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026).

The downside comes from the part of calendar 2026 that has not happened yet. NOAA’s June 2026 ENSO strength table assigns a 62% chance of a very strong El Niño for Oct–Dec 2026 and 63% for Nov 2026–Jan 2027, and WMO’s June 2, 2026 update puts the probability of El Niño at 80% for Jun–Aug 2026 and near or above 90% through at least November (NOAA CPC ENSO strength probabilities, issued June 2026, WMO El Niño update, June 2 2026). Reuters also reported on June 2, 2026 that Côte d’Ivoire had already sold about 950,000–1,000,000 tonnes of 2026/27 main-crop export contracts but had slowed further sales because of El Niño risk and fragile crop development (Reuters via Zonebourse, June 2 2026).

The structural drag is disease, age, and input use. USDA/FAS said swollen shoot virus was affecting eleven of thirteen main cocoa-producing regions and that prior mitigation had led to uprooting on more than 100,000 hectares, while FAO said on May 5, 2026 that Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana had adopted a 2026–2031 five-year roadmap to roll back cocoa swollen shoot disease after an Abidjan workshop on April 14–15, 2026 (USDA/FAS Cocoa Sector Overview 2025, FAO, May 5 2026). Reuters reported on May 18, 2026 that small retailers across eight cocoa basins said up to 90% of fertilizer and crop-protection stocks remained unsold, which could reduce yields and increase pests and disease pressure in 2026/27 (Reuters via BusinessWorld, May 18 2026).

The obvious read is to use the CCC’s 2.0–2.1 million tonne 2025/26 crop-year range as the answer. That is close, but it is not identical to calendar year 2026. Calendar 2026 excludes late-2025 beans from the strong current crop and includes late-2026 beans from the next crop, where NOAA, WMO, and CCC-linked Reuters reporting all point to more risk than normal (NOAA CPC ENSO strength probabilities, issued June 2026, WMO El Niño update, June 2 2026, Reuters via Zonebourse, June 2 2026).

The other trap is treating port arrivals as physical production. Arrivals are strong enough to reject the March 2026 1.8 million tonne consensus, but they are still a marketing-flow measure affected by pricing, unsold stocks, quality rejections, port timing, and official classification (Reuters via MarketScreener, May 21 2026, Vesper, June 11 2026). That is why I center near 2.04 million tonnes instead of pushing the forecast to 2.1–2.2 million tonnes.

The largest limitation is source definition. ICCO is the preferred source in the resolution rules, but its public country numbers are cocoa-year numbers; FAOSTAT is annual, but the 2026 value will arrive late and may follow national reporting conventions rather than a clean harvest-date accounting (ICCO May 2026 QBCS summary, OWID/FAOSTAT). The 2024/25 gap between ICCO’s 1.681 million tonnes and USDA/FAS’s 1.750 million tonnes shows that source choice alone can move the answer by tens of thousands of tonnes (ICCO Annual Report 2024/25, USDA/FAS GAIN IV2025-0015).

The second limitation is that the year is only half observed. The July–August 2026 tail of the mid-crop and the Sep–Dec 2026 opening of the next main crop still depend on rainfall, heat, pod survival, farmer input use, and disease pressure (Reuters via BusinessWorld, May 18 2026, Reuters via Zonebourse, June 2 2026). The third limitation is measurement: production, arrivals, exports, domestic grindings, stocks, and quality-adjusted usable beans are related but not the same number.