Germany vs Ivory Coast at the World Cup — Two Nations Linked by Cocoa, Climate Change and Colonial History

This afternoon at BMO Field in Toronto, Germany take on Ivory Coast in a Group E clash that could decide who tops the table at this World Cup. Julian Nagelsmann's side arrive having thrashed Curacao 7-1, while Ivory Coast scraped past Ecuador 1-0 thanks to a stoppage-time winner. On the pitch, it is a contest between a four-time champion looking to atone for early exits in 2018 and 2022, and an underdog nation making just its fourth World Cup appearance and first since 2014.

Off the pitch, though, these two countries sit on opposite ends of one of the starkest inequalities in the global economy, an inequality made sharper by a warming planet. Ivory Coast grows roughly 40% of the world's cocoa, the raw ingredient in nearly every bar of chocolate eaten in Germany and across the wealthy world. That cocoa is now under serious threat from rising temperatures and erratic rainfall, even as Germany, one of the largest chocolate-consuming nations on Earth, continues to grapple with its own climate extremes and a colonial history that helped shape West Africa's economy in the first place. Today's match is a contest of football. It is also, almost by accident, a small window into how unevenly the costs of climate change are spread around the world.

Ivory Coast: The Country That Feeds the World's Chocolate Habit

To understand why Ivory Coast matters so much to the global cocoa trade, the scale involved is worth sitting with. Côte d'Ivoire produces roughly 40% of the world's cocoa output, with Ghana adding another fifth, meaning two West African countries together supply roughly 60% of the cocoa that ends up in chocolate bars, drinks and desserts worldwide. For Ivory Coast specifically, cocoa is not a minor export crop. It is the backbone of an industry worth tens of billions of dollars and the livelihood of millions of small-scale farmers across the country's forested southern and central regions.

That dependence is exactly what makes the climate threat to cocoa farming so consequential, both for Ivory Coast and for chocolate lovers everywhere. In recent years, prolonged drought, rising temperatures and erratic rainfall have caused cocoa output to plunge by as much as 40% compared with normal harvests, pushing global cocoa prices to levels not seen since the 1970s. West Africa now experiences roughly 40 extra days per year above 32 degrees Celsius compared with pre-climate-change baselines, a level of heat stress that cocoa trees, which evolved to thrive in stable, humid tropical conditions, are simply not built to withstand. Aging trees, soil degradation and disease outbreaks compound the problem, but researchers are clear that climate change sits underneath much of the recent volatility.

The longer-term outlook is even more sobering. A study from Wageningen University modelling conditions through 2060 found that up to half of Ivory Coast's current cocoa-growing land could become climatically unsuitable for the crop within the coming decades, as rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns push the viable cocoa belt northward into regions and, in some projections, into entirely different countries such as Nigeria and Cameroon. For the millions of Ivorian farmers whose families have grown cocoa for generations, this is not an abstract scientific projection. It is a slow-moving threat to their land, their income and their way of life.

Germany's Own Climate Reckoning

It would be a mistake to treat this as a story about Ivory Coast's problem and Germany's chocolate. Germany has its own, very real climate crisis unfolding closer to home, even if it looks different in character and severity from what cocoa farmers face in West Africa.

2023 was Germany's hottest year since national records began in 1881, with average temperatures reaching 1.3 degrees Celsius above the 1991-to-2020 reference period. That followed a punishing run of recent summers marked by severe heatwaves and drought across the country, part of a broader pattern that saw 2023 recognised as the hottest year on record globally and brought devastating heatwaves across Europe, including an all-time temperature record of 44 degrees Celsius set in Albania. The German government's response included introducing its first national heat protection plan in 2023, aimed at halving heat-related excess deaths, and making climate adaptation legally binding for federal, state and local authorities for the first time.

Germany's climate exposure is real, but it is fundamentally different in character from Ivory Coast's. A German heatwave strains hospitals, infrastructure and vulnerable populations, and it is a serious public health issue that the government has had to scramble to address. It does not, however, threaten to wipe out the country's primary economic livelihood in the way that climate stress threatens Ivorian cocoa farmers, whose household income and the broader national economy are tied directly to a crop that is becoming harder to grow in its traditional homeland. This asymmetry, between climate change as a public health and infrastructure challenge in a wealthy country and climate change as a threat to the literal economic survival of farming communities in a developing one, is one of the clearest illustrations of how unevenly this crisis falls on different parts of the world.

The Colonial Thread, and Where It Actually Runs

It is worth being precise here, because the colonial history of West Africa is often flattened into a single story when the details actually matter. Germany was a significant, and often brutal, colonial power in Africa, but its West African territories were Togo and Cameroon, formally proclaimed under German control after the 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference, not Ivory Coast itself. Ivory Coast was instead colonised by France, which ruled the territory from the late 19th century until independence in 1960, and it was French colonial administration, not German, that shaped Ivory Coast's transformation into an export-oriented cocoa economy.

That said, Germany's colonial record in the neighbouring territories it did control was severe by any measure. German rule in Togo and Cameroon involved forced labour, land seizure, and what historians describe as punitive expeditions marked by corporal punishment, executions and other forms of brutal coercion used to suppress local resistance, including the Duala uprising in Cameroon and Dagomba resistance in Togo. Germany's colonial presence in Africa was, more broadly, infamous for events including the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia, a chapter increasingly described as the first genocide of the 20th century.

What connects Germany to Ivory Coast's situation today is therefore not a direct colonial relationship, but a shared European colonial system that, across the entire region, reorganised West African economies around the export of raw commodities like cocoa, cotton and palm oil to European markets, a structure that has persisted, in modified form, long after independence. Germany did not colonise Ivory Coast, but Germany, like France, Britain, Belgium and other European powers, helped build and benefit from the broader colonial trading system that locked West African economies into supplying cheap raw materials to wealthier nations, including the cocoa that still flows overwhelmingly toward European chocolate manufacturers today. Today, Germany remains one of the world's largest per capita consumers of chocolate, sitting at the consumption end of a supply chain whose production end is now visibly destabilising under climate pressure that wealthy, industrialised nations did far more to cause.

Two Very Different Approaches to Climate Policy

The contrast between how Germany and Ivory Coast approach climate policy reflects the very different positions each country occupies in the global economy. Germany has the institutional capacity, financial resources and political infrastructure to pursue an ambitious, if contested, energy transition. The country has set a target of reaching 80% renewable electricity by 2030, alongside a longer-term goal of greenhouse gas neutrality, and has pursued an accelerated coal phase-out alongside major reforms to its renewable energy laws. That process has not been smooth. Germany has faced criticism from climate researchers and watchdog organisations for falling short of the emissions reductions needed for a 1.5-degree-compatible pathway, and recent political shifts have seen some climate measures, including elements of a renewable heating law passed in 2023, partially rolled back under pressure from rising costs and public pushback. Even so, Germany's climate debate is fundamentally a debate about the pace and design of a transition it has the resources to pursue.

Ivory Coast's climate challenge looks entirely different, because adaptation, not energy transition, is the immediate priority. Cocoa industry stakeholders, the Ivorian government and international development organisations have focused on measures such as breeding drought- and heat-resistant cocoa varieties, training farmers in climate-resilient agricultural techniques, and raising farm-gate prices to help cushion farmers against falling yields. The Ivorian government has also taken steps to address deforestation linked to cocoa expansion, recognising that clearing more forest to compensate for declining yields elsewhere would only deepen the underlying environmental problem. But these adaptation efforts are happening against a backdrop of far more limited financial resources than Germany commands, and they are responding to a crisis that Ivory Coast did very little to cause. The country's per-person greenhouse gas emissions are a small fraction of Germany's, yet it is Ivorian farmers, not German consumers, who are losing their crops and their incomes first.

What a Football Match Can and Cannot Tell Us

None of this means today's match in Toronto is secretly about climate policy. It is a World Cup group game with serious stakes, and both sets of players and fans will be focused, rightly, on goals, tactics and qualification scenarios. But major sporting events have an unusual power to draw a brief, genuine spotlight onto countries that the global news cycle otherwise overlooks, and Ivory Coast's presence on this stage offers exactly that kind of opening.

For the millions of viewers around the world who will recognise Ivorian players like Simon Adingra, Franck Kessié or Wilfried Singo without necessarily knowing much about the country they represent, this match is a small, accidental invitation to learn something more. Ivory Coast is not merely a footballing nation with talented wingers. It is the country whose farmers, often without realising it, supply the cocoa inside chocolate bars sold in German supermarkets, French patisseries and American convenience stores, and those farmers are now on the front line of a climate crisis that the wealthy, chocolate-consuming nations of the world did far more to create. A football match will not change that imbalance. But it might, for ninety minutes and the days of conversation that follow, get more people to notice it.

The Bottom Line

Germany and Ivory Coast will be separated today by a wide gap in footballing pedigree, financial resources and global profile, much as they are separated by a wide gap in how much each has contributed to climate change and how much each is now suffering for it. Germany's challenge is to manage a difficult but fundamentally manageable energy transition while protecting its population from increasingly severe heatwaves. Ivory Coast's challenge is to keep an entire national economy and millions of livelihoods afloat as the climate conditions that made it the world's leading cocoa producer slip further out of reach. Whatever the final score in Toronto, that deeper story will still be unfolding long after the players have left the pitch, in cocoa fields thousands of miles from either team's training ground.

*This article is for informational purposes only. Climate and economic data referenced is sourced from Wageningen University, the Salata Institute at Harvard, Clean Energy Wire, the Climate Action Tracker, and the UN Development Programme.*