Summarised by Centrist
Writing for The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison argues that a widely repeated claim tying expensive chocolate to climate change has run ahead of the facts.
He says the story took off after bad harvests in West Africa and media coverage blaming “climate change” for rising Easter egg prices, but says “sadly missing in recent chocolate climate claptrap is that an improved recent harvest” has now helped drive “a massive 75% slump in global cocoa prices”.
Morrison says cocoa prices have fallen sharply from their peak, dropping “from a peak level of around $12,900 a metric ton in January 2025” to “around $3,240 in March 2026”. His argument is that “two years of bad weather have been followed by better conditions”, and that, together with weaker demand, this has punctured the idea that high cocoa prices were a straightforward sign of climate breakdown.
He is critical of claims that human activity made extreme heat in cocoa-growing areas “10 times more likely”, describing that as a “computer-modelled pseudoscientific guess”. He says “irregular harvests leading to market price movements are not uncommon in the cocoa growing business”, and argues that “inserting made-up tales of human-caused climate change to explain the complex workings of the world’s cocoa and chocolate markets is little more than political posturing”.
Instead, Morrison points to more practical pressures on cocoa production, including “poor pest control and ageing trees affecting production”, while also noting that “manufacturers have been reducing the amount of cocoa in chocolate products”. He says the wider lesson is that “bad weather spells causing irregular harvests are simply natural events”.
