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Ivorian cocoa traders demand their share of Côte d'Ivoire's cacao. The GNI, their grouping, which also includes local processors, denounces nothing less than a "monopoly" on the part of multinationals. In the crosshairs, six major foreign groups: American Cargill, French Sucden and Touton, Singaporean Olam, Swiss Barry Callebaut and Ecom, which export, via their subsidiaries in Côte d'Ivoire, virtually all of the country's cocoa production now, including 25% in the form of powder, butter and cocoa liquor.
This blocks the development of local processing, estimates the GNI spokesperson, since these multinationals still have factories outside of Côte d'Ivoire. And this poses a competition problem and thus a "dependency of Côte d'Ivoire on multinationals", estimates Fabien Guei, when it comes to negotiating prices. The phenomenon has intensified over twenty years, he laments, with mergers that gave multinationals a commercial and financial surface difficult to compete with for local players.
Major chocolate makers no longer take risks
At the same time the chocolate industry was delegating more and more to these cocoa giants "the risks related to supply in Africa, such as child labor, deforestation and default risks". "Nestlé, Mars, Ferrero, Lindt, Mondelez, Valrhona no longer buy cocoa or semi-finished products from Ivorian operators", who have become the "last resort" suppliers of cocoa multinationals, which themselves supply chocolate giants.
2017 default crisis
"Our members were not involved in the 2017 defaults crisis", the GNI spokesperson is keen to clarify, with reference to bullish speculation conducted without a net by around thirty small operators, a third of them Ivorians, which had cost Côte d'Ivoire dearly and cast discredit on local traders.
Today, the Grouping of Ivorian Traders is asking the regulator, the Coffee Cocoa Council, to require multinationals to buy 20 to 30% of their supplies from local operators. "We are studying the content of their demands", says Ivorian agriculture minister Kobenan Kouassi Adjoumani, when questioned by RFI. "We want multinationals to support them".
