Cocoa

The main producing areas are the forest zone of Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Ekiti and Ogun states, with production also in Edo, Delta and Cross River states. Cocoa needs shade, high rainfall and deep soils, which is why it follows the rainforest belt rather than the savannah.

Cocoa was introduced to south-western Nigeria in the later nineteenth century and spread quickly among smallholders through the early decades of colonial rule, carried by farmers rather than plantations. Marketing boards handled purchase and export from the 1940s. Cocoa export earnings funded much of the Western Region's public spending in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the Cocoa House in Ibadan, completed in the mid-1960s, was built from that revenue.

Cocoa was historically one of Nigeria's principal export crops and the Western Region's main source of revenue before oil earnings displaced agricultural exports in the late 1960s and 1970s. It remains an important smallholder export crop. No current tonnages or prices are given here.

Cocoa expansion cleared large areas of rainforest in the south-west over the twentieth century, and ageing trees, pests such as black pod and capsids, and pesticide use are ongoing issues on smallholdings. Income from cocoa is exposed to world price swings, which has repeatedly affected farming households in the region.

Cocoa revenue is directly tied to Obafemi Awolowo, whose Western Region government in the 1950s used marketing board earnings from the crop to fund free primary education, a regional television service and public works — a link between a single commodity and public policy that later informed arguments about resource revenue during the First Republic.