Rigged Scales in the Cocoa Trade
Friday, May 8, 2026
Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes / Unsplash
Cocoa prices fell in 2026. Chocolate makers cheered. About 40% of cocoa-growing households still send children into the fields. The math is older than the market.
What's happening
Cocoa prices dropped in 2026 after harvests recovered, and chocolate makers welcomed the lower input costs. In a Euronews interview on May 4, Tony's Chocolonely CEO Douglas Lamont argued that cheap chocolate is the same structure that produces child labor on West African farms. About 40% of cocoa-growing households worldwide face instances of child labor. Tony's pays a living-income reference price of roughly $2,200 per tonne — a 45% premium over the West African farmgate — and reports a child-labor rate of around 4% in its supply chain.
The company posted €240 million in turnover in 2025, with 20% value growth.
What the Text says
Amos preaches in the eighth century BC to a kingdom enjoying a market boom. He goes after the merchants.
Amos 8:4-64Hear this, you who desire to swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail,5Saying, 'When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit;6that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes, and sell the sweepings with the wheat?'"
"Making the ephah small and the shekel large" is a rigged scale: smaller measure of grain, heavier weight of silver. The seller gives less and charges more on the same transaction. Deuteronomy answers it directly — "you shall have a perfect and just weight"
Deuteronomy 25:15You shall have a perfect and just weight. You shall have a perfect and just measure, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you.
A market in which the seller cannot live on what the buyer pays is not a free market. It is a small ephah, dressed up as price discovery. Amos calls the merchants what they are: people who swallow up the needy.
The reflection
The cocoa industry has long argued it cannot afford to pay farmers more. A profitable European chocolate company, at €240 million in turnover, paying 45% over the farmgate, is the answer to that claim. The constraint was never the math.
Forty percent of cocoa-growing households send their children into the fields because the price has been set below the cost of a child not working. That is what a rigged scale produces, three thousand years after Amos. The weights are still in the bag.