Nigeria: Four African Cocoa Giants Join Forces with the Abuja Declaration

The global chocolate industry, worth over 130 billion dollars annually according to estimates cited by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, has relied for decades on African harvests without producer countries capturing the majority of the value. This imbalance, inherited from historical trade dynamics, already prompted joint regulation attempts between Abidjan and Accra in the 2010s. On July 14, 2026, at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon signed the Abuja Declaration, officially creating the Cocoa Value Addition Alliance, a coalition of four of the world's largest cocoa producers. The challenge is to repatriate a larger share of the added value to the continent, currently concentrated among chocolate manufacturers, by developing local processing, employment, and farmers' incomes. It remains to be seen, in an upcoming analysis, whether this alliance will have binding mechanisms (quotas, joint financing of factories, monetary harmonization between the naira, cedi, and CFA franc) or if it remains, at this stage, a political declaration of intent whose effectiveness will depend on its concrete implementation.