I’ll never forget the day my sister pulled out several dozen chocolate bars from her gigantic red suitcase. She spread out heaps of colorfully wrapped chocolate with all sorts of flavors — mango, banana, ginger, strawberry, orange, coconut, coffee — infused into silky smooth milk chocolate. I had never tasted anything like it.

It took my family weeks to finish all the bars, each bite was a bit of solace during what everyone was calling unprecedented times — the COVID-19 pandemic.

The chocolate was made by the company Niche Cocoa based in Ghana where my sister’s year-long research fellowship at the University of Ghana had been cut short due to the pandemic. Now she was back home in Los Angeles, where I was completing my senior year of high school from an iPad.

For the first time in my life, I began to think about where chocolate comes from.

Like many Americans, I had no knowledge of the global chocolate industry or Ghana’s key role in it. Cocoa grows on tropical trees called cacao that have football-shaped pods where cocoa beans — the primary ingredient for chocolate — are encased in a squishy white pulp. For every five pounds of cocoa beans sold on global markets, three of them come from West Africa, according to the International Cocoa Organization. Côte d'Ivoire alone grows about 40% percent and another 14% percent is harvested in neighboring Ghana.

More recently, it has become clear that this production is increasingly vulnerable. In 2024, Ghana’s production of cocoa dropped by nearly a third due to poor harvests earlier in the year, according to the International Cocoa Organization, a half-century old organization overseeing 53 cocoa importing and exporting countries, that goes by the acronym ICCO.

This led to a global cocoa shortage and skyrocketing prices, where the average price of cocoa beans nearly doubled compared to 2023, according to the organization’s index of daily cocoa prices.

Côte d'Ivoire’s cocoa production also dropped almost 20% in 2024, but Ghana’s has been consistently declining since the 2020-21 growing season.

According to cocoa business experts based in West Africa like ICCO’s Director of Economics Michele Nardella, the significant rise in cocoa prices was triggered by two increasingly consequential threats to agriculture in Ghana: climate change and illegal gold mining.

The more I learned about West Africa’s cocoa, the more I realized the future of the industry that produces our beloved chocolate is more vulnerable than we think. Ghana’s effects on U.S. chocolate is a blaring reminder that what seems like a distant struggle in a far-away land can actually have a profound influence on something we cherish, like a bar of chocolate that we might take for granted.

Climate change is also exacerbating tree diseases, like cocoa swollen shoot virus disease, which is detrimental to cocoa. “It’s a virus that slowly depletes the energy of the tree. It produces fewer and fewer pods and eventually will kill the tree” said Victoria Kichuk, a chocolate sommelier and founder of Cocoa Beantown, a company that puts on chocolate events and tours in Boston, Massachusetts.

The disease is spread by white fuzzy insects called mealybugs. They breed rapidly in hot and dry weather, so droughts exacerbate swollen shoot disease. Currently, there’s no known cure.

“The only way to get rid of the virus in the trees is you have to rip the trees out and burn them,” Kichuk said.

But, despite the effects on agriculture and livelihoods, Guigma says that the search for solutions to climate change in West African countries like Ghana isn’t often a priority.

“This is yet an overlooked issue in the region, in Africa in general, and even more so on the West African side, because of the many competing priorities in the region…Besides climate, we have a lot of political and conflict issues, and as a result, it's not always easy for decision-makers to make it a priority,” he said.

Gold and Chocolate:

Cocoa's Unexpected Killer

To locals like Boateng, a second-generation cocoa farmer, it’s clear climate change is just one ingredient in cocoa’s volatility.

There’s also gold. Ghana is the world’s sixth largest producer of the precious metal, according to the World Gold Council. The small-scale illegal gold mining, which often creates toxic waste, is known as galamsey and has been cutting down cocoa farms and contaminating the water farmers need for cocoa trees.

There’s also gold. Ghana is the world’s sixth largest producer of the precious metal, according to the World Gold Council. The small-scale illegal gold mining, which often creates toxic waste, is known as galamsey and has been cutting down cocoa farms and contaminating the water farmers need for cocoa trees.

“The problem we are facing is galamsey. You see the galamsey are cutting down trees, they are spoiling the aquatic bodies, they are spoiling the cocoa farm. Everything,” Boateng said. He added that miners go to farms at night and “the next day, they have destroyed a whole [cocoa] farm,” to make room for the mines.

Both of Boateng's parents were cocoa farmers. “When I would come from school I had to join them in the bush…and be planting cocoa or cultivating cocoa,” he said. Now he’s had his own cocoa farm for 10 years — but the threat of having his farm destroyed by illegal gold miners looms over his head.

In addition to damaging farms, the mines have environmental and health effects.

“They destroy the land and water all around…The farmers ourselves, we are suffering from not getting clean and proper water to even water our seedlings, because it’s full of chemicals — cyanide and mercury,” Boateng said.

Nasiba Mbabe Bawa, a 29-year-old Ghanaian social activist, described how Ghanaians drink and use polluted water for everyday life. "We cook with pipe water, poison water. We bathe with poison water. We drink poison water, and that's why it's important that it stops,” she said over a zoom call.

This year, Ghanaians marched in the streets of Accra, the country’s capital, to call for an end to galamsey. Bawa was one of the organizers of a three-day long protest in October. Ghana’s authorities arrested 53 galamsey protestors just a week before for what was considered unlawful assembly.

Boateng said that although galamsey has been around for a while, it’s become rampant in the last few years. “Initially they were hiding, but now they show up,” Boateng said.

Galamsey was a key issue on the minds of Ghanaian voters during Ghana’s December 2024 election, both Boateng and Bawa said.

Bawa said she hopes the newly elected party, the National Democratic Congress, which won in a landslide victory, will end galamsey.

“They have two thirds in parliament. They have it, so there is no excuse…We [will] hold you accountable for what you said you will do,” Bawa said.

Cocoa farmers like Boateng fear the impact galamsey has on their livelihoods. “In a year or two to come, if nothing is done, I don’t know what the industry will look like,” he said.

The Future of Cocoa

Kichuk, who's been in the chocolate industry for almost 15 years, shared ways the U.S. chocolate industry is trying to adapt.

Major players like Hershey, Mars and Nestle may look for cocoa from other regions such as Latin America, which would amount to a major market shift.

Graham, who is also president of the board of directors for Fine Chocolate Industry Association, already sources much of her cocoa from Latin America. But because Ghana’s shortage continues to affect so much of the industry, prices for Latin American cocoa also increased this year. “I've seen the price go up on every single cocoa bean we source,” Graham said.

In response to rising cocoa prices, manufacturers like Hershey are also experimenting with reducing the percentage of cocoa in their products, or replacing cocoa with other ingredients altogether.

This May, Hershey announced a Kit Kat vanilla flavor, along with a pink lemonade flavor. For Halloween, Kit Kat used a cinnamon creme coating for their special ghost toast flavor, replacing their traditional chocolate covering.

Adaptations like this may be reasonable bandaids in the short-term, but it's unclear how U.S. chocolate lovers would be affected if the situation worsens.

Ultimately, nothing can really replace Americans’ life-long relationship with chocolate. “I have yet to meet someone that remembers their first taste of chocolate, because for all of us, it happens when we're so small,” Kichuk said. But given the precarious realities of cocoa production, Americans may need to brace themselves for that relationship to evolve.