Negotiations leading to the seventh International Cocoa Agreement (ICCA) got underway in Yaounde, Cameroon in late March. ICCAs are general agreements that are supposed to foster cooperation between producer and consumer countries, encourage sustainable cocoa farming and help producer countries. Over the years, these agreements included market intervention mechanisms such as buffer stocks to smooth out cocoa price fluctuations but since the 1990s, such mechanism have been eliminated in favor of increased information dissemination and reliance on market mechanism.