Ivory Coast’s Coffee and Cocoa Council is warning that a delayed start to the 2026/27 main cocoa crop could cause serious congestion at the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro in November and December, according to Reuters, which cited two council sources and five exporters. The delay stems from difficult weather, insufficient farm maintenance, and an unusually strong mid-crop that pushed back development of the main harvest. One source put the delay at eight to ten weeks.
The timing is not incidental. The European Union’s deforestation regulation (EUDR) takes effect at the end of December, requiring companies to prove that cocoa entering the EU market is not linked to deforestation. Exporters are expected to rush shipments before the deadline, concentrating arrivals into a narrower window than usual. Ports typically receive 800,000 to 1 million tonnes of cocoa in the October-to-December period. Reuters reports about 900,000 tonnes are expected this year, within that normal range, but compressed later into the quarter. That compression, not the total volume, is what is driving the congestion risk.
The Council said last week that the country was ready for the new EU rules. Its head, Yves Brahima Kone, said digital ID cards issued to farmers, in place since 2019 and tested for two years, would ensure traceability from the start of the season on 1 September. The cards function as electronic wallets, track cocoa from farm to port, verify origin, and give farmers access to the state-guaranteed price. Kone said the system would also give more than a million small-scale producers their first access to the banking system.
Exporters are less confident. Several described the compliance system as too complex to implement smoothly, warning of delays across purchasing, exports and the broader supply chain once the season opens.
The gap between the Council’s public reassurance and exporters’ private warnings is the story here. Ivory Coast supplies close to half the world’s cocoa, so a bottleneck at its two main ports would ripple into global chocolate supply chains at the exact moment global buyers are adjusting to a new EU compliance regime. If congestion materializes as exporters describe, the practical effect is higher freight and storage costs passed through the chain, and possible delays in EU-bound shipments right as the deforestation rule takes hold, which is the opposite of what a traceability system is meant to prevent.
What to watch next: whether November-December port arrivals bear out the compressed-timing risk, whether the digital ID card system holds up under the volume it needs to process in a shorter window, and how the EU treats documented delays tied to the transition rather than flagging them as non-compliance.