Côte d'Ivoire grows roughly four in every ten tonnes of the world's cocoa, and no other single origin matters as much to EU chocolate. It is also the origin whose deforestation history shaped EUDR itself. The result is a country that is simultaneously the hardest test of the regulation and, thanks to a national traceability push, better mapped than its reputation suggests. This page adds the Ivorian specifics to the cocoa guide.
Standard risk, and the history behind it
Côte d'Ivoire defaults to standard risk, so the full due diligence cycle applies. The country lost most of its forest cover in two generations, much of it to cocoa, including documented production inside classified forests and national parks. That history is why authorities and NGOs watch Ivorian supply chains closely, and why your risk assessment for Ivorian lots should treat protected-area proximity as a first-class check, not an afterthought: a plot can be deforestation-free after 2020 and still be illegally located, which fails the legality limb of Article 3.
The national traceability system
Since 2023 the Conseil du Café-Cacao has been rolling out a national system that registers growers, issues producer identity cards, and maps farm plots, explicitly to keep Ivorian cocoa sellable into the EU. Exporters and cooperatives increasingly hold GPS records for their supply base, and the large trading houses have mapped hundreds of thousands of farms under their own programmes and the Cocoa & Forests Initiative. For an importer this means the data usually exists somewhere in your chain. The questions are contractual: will the exporter release plot-level data per lot, in a usable format, with grower identifiers that let you join deliveries to plots? Ask for GeoJSON and validate on receipt.
Plot geometry: points, mostly
Ivorian cocoa farms cluster between 2 and 4 hectares, so most plots can be declared as single points; larger farms and some cooperative blocks need polygons. Two data defects recur in Ivorian files: duplicate coordinates reused across different growers (a sign the enumerator stood at the buying station, not the farm), and areas recorded as strings or left blank, which TRACES silently mishandles on points. The smallholder collection guide covers the checks that catch both before filing.
Indirect supply: the pisteur problem
A substantial share of Ivorian cocoa still reaches exporters through independent intermediaries buying farm-gate. Those beans arrive with no plot linkage at all, and blending them into an EU-bound lot makes the whole consignment unfileable. Exporters manage this by segregating EU-destined volumes to their mapped, direct supply base. Your job is to verify that claim: ask what share of the exporter's intake is mapped, how EU lots are segregated from indirect purchases, and whether lot documents carry the cooperative and grower identifiers that tie back to the plot file. The conclusion that nothing unmapped mixed in is exactly what your negligible-risk finding rests on.
Working sequence for Ivorian cocoa
- Contract plot data per lot: points with numeric areas, grower and cooperative identifiers, production dates.
- Validate geometry and check every point against protected-area boundaries as well as the 2020 cutoff.
- Interrogate segregation between mapped direct supply and indirect purchases.
- Screen, resolve flags with the exporter, file in TRACES, retain everything five years.
Next door, Ghana presents the same farms and a completely different procedure: it sits in the low-risk tier, and the border between the two is the mixing question EU authorities will ask about first.