This white paper – The Futures of Africa’s Cocoa Industry: People, Climate, and Sovereignty – distills insights from the Cocoa Workshop held at Harvard University on April 10-11, 2025, where multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners examined the intertwined social, economic, and environmental pressures reshaping cocoa across Africa.

Framing cocoa’s crisis – volatile prices, producer poverty, deforestation and disease, labor precarity, illegal mining, and climate shocks – the authors assess current policy experiments and argue for producer-centered approaches. They highlight pathways such as agroforestry and weather intelligence, value-added models, and deeper pan-African and South-South coordination on research, finance, and market power.

The result is an actionable agenda to move beyond buyer-led “sustainability” toward sovereignty, resilience, and shared prosperity for cocoa-growing communities.