Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has laid out an ambitious vision for keeping more of Africa’s cocoa value on the continent, using this week’s Cocoa Value Addition Summit to float early proposals for Nigeria to coordinate with Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Ghana on a shared strategy, one market observers are already comparing to OPEC’s model for oil-producing nations.
The economics driving the push are stark. The global finished chocolate market is worth roughly $150 billion, with African countries supplying over 70% of the cocoa that goes into it yet farming communities capture only 5-10% of that value, a gap rooted in a supply chain structure that has historically returned the bulk of profits to European-based processing facilities and corporations. A recent agreement between Ivory Coast and Ghana to deepen cooperation on driving greater local value from cocoa supply chains, one they’ve proposed extending to other African producers, set the stage for this week’s summit and the broader coordination question it has now raised.
Nigeria’s cocoa industry accounts for around 7% of international supplies, and Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (FMAFS) framed the summit’s core aim as revitalising local processing to drive economic growth in a sector that remains the country’s leading non-oil GDP contributor. Tinubu was direct about the shift underway, he said, “Nigeria is shifting from exporting raw cocoa to processing it domestically, to create jobs, attract investments and earn more foreign exchange from the cocoa sub sector.”
He put the continental imbalance in blunt terms, “Africa produces about 70% of the world’s cocoa, the continent earns only a tiny fraction of the over $130bn global chocolate industry because most processing, branding and manufacturing take place overseas. The proof is already rising out of the ground. At Sagamu, Nigerian investors are building a 70,000 ton processing facility, the largest this nation has ever seen. Our national grinding capacity has crossed 120,000 tons a year, and it’s growing. The Bank of Industry stands ready as a co-convener of this summit, with capital prepared for deployment into bankable projects.”
More than 350,000 Nigerian farming families cultivate cocoa across over 1.4 million hectares, making the country one of the world’s leading producers with roughly six to seven percent of global output, a sector that now accounts for nearly a quarter of Nigeria’s non-oil exports. Reinforcing the production side, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security delivered its One Million Improved Cocoa Seedlings Roll-Out Programme this past week at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria in Ibadan, Oyo State, distributing seedlings bred for greater disease resistance and higher yields.
Tinubu framed the timing as uniquely favourable for origin-country processing, “There has never been a moment when processing of origin made more commercial sense than it does today. Nigeria is not asking for charity. Nigeria is offering the best open position in the global food economy. We are open for business and we are serious. Take it to our farmers, the true owners of this crop. I make a promise, and I make it in the name of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Value addition is not a project to be done around you. It is a covenant to be kept with you. For a century, the reward of this harvest has been far from the hands that raise it.”
Nigeria’s Minister of State for Industry welcomed the President’s outline as a major building block for the sector’s wider goals, reaffirming that the country’s target has shifted from measuring export volumes to measuring the value created in cocoa before it ever leaves for export markets, a framing that, if adopted regionally alongside Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, would mark a structural change in how West Africa’s cocoa economy captures value from a $150 billion global industry it currently supplies but barely profits from.
