Cocoa prices keep rising. Futures contracts for May delivery continue to gain 3.9% to 10,030 dollars per ton, a new all-time high - and the first time this agricultural commodity has traded in the 10,000 dollar range. For the year as a whole, prices have already reached 138%.

Contributing to this scenario are several factors: difficult weather conditions and diseases attacking cocoa trees have been affecting harvests in West Africa - which produces around 70% of the world's cocoa.

The world's two largest producers, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, have recently been hit by a combination of heavy rains, alternating with dry weather, and disease, says CNBC, quoted by the newspaper Business. The black pod disease has spread to many cocoa trees in these two countries, thus affecting harvests, according to the International Cocoa Organization. In addition, the poor condition of the roads, in a context of heavy rain, has made it even more difficult to get the available beans to the ports.

With all this, the appreciation of cocoa has been staggering. At the beginning of February, prices were at 46-year highs, at 4,966 dollars per ton. Now they're twice as high - and already more expensive than copper, an industrial metal that acts as a leading indicator of the health of the economy.

The commodity has thus been particularly buoyed by fears that harvests (and respective exports) in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana may be lower than expected - at a time when the market is preparing for a third successive global deficit in the current 2023/24 agricultural year.

The dry and dusty winds (the so-called Harmattan) could also penalize the harvest in West Africa in general, which begins in April, Commerzbank recently pointed out in a research report.