Click for Prices
The roller coaster of cocoa prices continues. Since the December 16 high of $3,636/ton, cocoa prices have dropped by almost $600/ton as measured by the ICCO Daily Price. There hasn’t been much in terms of news that might warrant this decline. Yes, production in the current year is higher than previously expected, but the surplus of 80,000 tons (as predicted by the ICCO according to a Bloomberg article) isn’t very much in light of previous four years of deficits.
The rational way to determine prices
For anyone believing in the power of markets to accurately predict the future, this week was a challenge. On Wednesday, Business Week reported that cocoa prices were dropping on “concerns supply will outpace demand.” Cocoa butter has been piling up in Europe with stocks reaching 50,000 tons. Inventories in NY are rising as well. Finally, a bank projection puts the production of the top three growers (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia) at 2.59 million tons, about 160,000 tons more than last year. So the speculators got out of the game.
Pods ready for harvest
News of the decline of Ivorian cocoa production might be premature. I have reported earlier that a consensus estimate put Ivorian output for the current cocoa year at 1-1.15 million tons, quite a bit below the 1.4 million tons the country had achieved only a few years ago. But that consensus is no longer holding.
