Struggling to impose on buyers the single price of beans set by the cartel recently formed with Ghana,
Côte d'Ivoire is preparing to circumvent them by processing the beans itself.
Announced in July, the surtax of $400 per tonne on beans leaving the fields in October of
next year drives multinationals away. To date, the Ivorian Coffee-Cocoa Council (CCC) is not yet
managed to sell more than 100,000 tons of beans at the new price, appropriately baptized "differential of
living income" (DRD). Worse, the agreements reached so far are only purchase options and not
definitive contracts, despite the authorization to proceed with over-the-counter sales which was given by the
Presidency of the CCI to impose the new tariff.

To circumvent chocolate makers, the CCC has already planned to become a bean processor. yves
Koné, the director of the institution, created for this purpose the company Transcao Côte d'Ivoire, a 100% subsidiary of the CCC.
A project to build two factories, each with a capacity of 50,000 tonnes, in Abidjan and
San Pedro, is gestation. Transcao has its own sites at the port of Abidjan and has already
recovered the assets of Choco Ivoire, the subsidiary of the Ivorian group Saf Cacao liquidated on the initiative of Yves Koné.
To lead Transcao, the CCC has recruited Théodore Konan Coulibaly, a former employee of the American trading giant
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).