ABSTRACT
Shifts in the global geography of cocoa sourcing patterns provide distinctive marks in the histories of key production areas. Explaining these shifts, however, has proved troublesome. On the one hand, ‘economistic’ explanations focus on rational behaviour by cocoa farmers. These approaches can be traced to Weymar (1968) who, in his classical contribution, explains these processes in terms of specific government incentives combined with farmers’ rational behaviour – new plantings are influenced by the real price received by the cocoa producer, the real price of competitive crops and the real costs of new plantings – and long-term fluctuations determined along conventional cobweb logics (low prices, decline in planting, decline in production, supply deficit, increasing prices, new plantings, supply surplus, declining prices, etc.). This line of thinking remains widespread among multilateral organizations (see for instance International Trade Centre (ITC) 2001) despite its obvious limitations. Most notably, the fluctuating but steady growth of global cocoa production (by about one million tonnes) since the mid-1980s at the same time as prices have declined or stagnated (except for a short recovery period in the mid-1990s) indicates that a more complex suite of factors influence the dynamics of cocoa production, compared to what is assumed within rational ‘economic man’ models.
