GEPA's 2025 Non-Traditional Export Statistics Report shows a 53 percent year-on-year surge, from $2.15 billion in 2024 to $3.28 billion in 2025. The driver was not luck or a commodity price spike. It was a deliberate industrial policy decision: stop shipping raw beans, start shipping the derivatives that global industries actually need. Cocoa paste earned $789.3 million, up 71 percent. Cocoa butter $635.7 million, up 120 percent. Cocoa powder $233.8 million, up 113 percent. Total cocoa sector earnings reached $3.69 billion, up 119 percent on the prior market year according to USDA data, and Ghana's exports to the United States alone hit a record $581.5 million in the first seven months of 2025.
The structural gap Nigeria must confront
Ghana is exporting the same crop Nigeria grows, but capturing four to six times more value per tonne by delivering industrial inputs to global buyers rather than raw material. Nigeria, the world's fourth largest cocoa producer, exported $1.63 billion in raw cocoa beans in 2024, predominantly to the Netherlands, Malaysia and Belgium. Our processing factories, once fifteen strong with 250,000 tonnes of combined capacity, now number five, operating at roughly 8 percent of installed capacity. We are leaving billions on the table, every single season.
What this means for trade finance practitioners
The financing implications are significant. Value-added commodity exports generate higher receivables, stronger invoice discounting collateral, better counterparty credit profiles and more bankable offtake structures. When a Nigerian exporter ships raw beans, the trade finance ticket is priced on commodity exposure. When a Ghanaian processor ships cocoa paste to a European confectionery buyer, the ticket is priced on industrial supply chain risk, which banks understand and can structure at tighter margins. The credit profile of a processor is fundamentally different from the credit profile of a bean exporter. We need to be financing the transformation, not just the shipment.
Nigeria has the land, the volume and the talent. We have a CBN export development mandate, an active non-oil export finance ecosystem and trade finance infrastructure that is increasingly sophisticated. What we are missing is the policy will to retain the processing node, and the institutional coordination to back it. Ghana just showed us the return on that decision. The crop is the same. The strategy is what is different.