The Independent Misleads About Rising Cocoa Prices, Government, Not Climate, is Responsible
By
Heartland Institute
April 28, 2025
By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
A recent article at The Independent, “How the climate crisis will push up prices for your Easter chocolate,” claims that cocoa bean production is threatened by climate change, and this is why prices are increasing. This is false. The Independent cites a study using a novel, recently developed AI model forecasting cocoa production in various countries, rather than investigating the full picture, and real world data, including neighboring nations’ cocoa production. To the extent cocoa prices are rising, it is not due to climate change induced shortages but rather government policies.
The Independent claims that extreme heat is increasing the risk to crops, and has been for “the past two decades in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ecuador, and Indonesia, according to modelling shared exclusively with The Independent from ClimateAi, a California-based machine learning company that models harvest outcomes. And that impact is only set to get worse as global temperatures increase.”
This AI modelling “has only been around for the last few months, and has been specifically designed to create accurate outlooks for more data-scarce environments like Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire[.]” The company claims it incorporates historic weather data, current satellite data, soil information and topography, as well as “local agricultural knowledge[.]”
https://climaterealism.com/2025/04/the-independent-misleads-about-rising-cocoa-prices-government-not-climate-is-responsible/
