Export crops follow world prices while staples depend on roads, and the east pays the most.

By Kanisa Magazine · June 2025

Congo’s cocoa is exported at a pace 39 per cent above last year, its coffee at a pace 73 per cent below, and 28 million people face acute food insecurity. The BCC’s digest for the week to 13 June 2025 puts the first two numbers on one page, and the humanitarian agencies supply the third. The three belong together. Crops that are priced in dollars and shipped through a handful of channels find buyers. Crops that must travel by weak roads to city markets do not.

That is the shape of Congo’s food economy in mid-2025: export crops follow the world price, and staples follow the road.

Cocoa up, coffee down

Two export crops from the same country have gone in opposite directions.

The digest’s production table records first-quarter exports of 24,417 tonnes of cocoa, 770 tonnes of coffee and 1,153 tonnes of rubber. Against 2024 totals of 70,044 tonnes of cocoa, 11,563 tonnes of coffee and 4,952 tonnes of rubber, those quarters imply annual paces of about 98,000 tonnes of cocoa, 3,100 tonnes of coffee and 4,600 tonnes of rubber. The comparison is crude, because harvests are seasonal and a quarter is not a year, but the gap in coffee is too wide to be seasonality alone.

The price table gives context. New York cocoa closed at US$9,768 a tonne on 13 June, 15 per cent below its level at the end of 2024, though it had been as low as US$7,902 at the end of March. London robusta coffee was US$4,444 a tonne, 8.8 per cent lower than at the end of the year.

Staples tell the other story

Flour output is flat and food prices are rising, while the east pays far more.

Wheat flour production in the first quarter was 53,681 tonnes, in line with the 2024 quarterly average of about 53,900. The Kinshasa food index rose 4.3 per cent between the end of 2024 and mid-June, a rate of about 9.6 per cent a year, in line with headline inflation.

The World Food Programme said on 23 May that more than 660,000 people had been displaced from Goma alone since January and that 2.3 million Congolese were in the most severe phase of food insecurity. Action Against Hunger, citing the January to June 2025 analysis, put 28 million people in acute food insecurity, 2.5 million more than projected in October 2024, including 10.2 million in the eastern provinces. Those are humanitarian estimates and carry the usual uncertainty, but they show how far market access, not production, decides who eats.

Why the road decides

A tonne of cocoa can pay for its own transport. A tonne of maize often cannot.

The mechanism is a matter of value per tonne and per kilometre. Cocoa sells at nearly US$10,000 a tonne, so a buyer can afford to collect it from remote farms, pay for storage and arrange export. Maize and cassava sell for a small fraction of that, so every extra kilometre eats the margin, and a bad road turns a surplus district into a shortage for the nearest city. Dollar-priced cash crops attract traders and working capital. Staples must rely on weak roads and a few small processors.

The franc adds a second filter. The currency has barely moved against the dollar in a year, so the franc cost of any dollar-priced input has been steady. Prices rise because of handling and supply, which the digest cannot decompose, not because of the exchange rate.

What the numbers imply

Invest between the farm and the city, in storage, drying and short-haul transport.

For agribusiness, the first implication is that the margin is in the middle of the chain, not at either end. Processors, storage operators and transporters can capture value by moving staples across short distances and keeping them from spoiling, in markets where the farmgate price and the city price differ widely.

The second is that export crops need a fallback. Cocoa’s pace is high now, but New York prices fell 15 per cent from their 2024 close, and coffee shows how quickly a crop can leave the export schedule. Lenders and buyers should size contracts for the lower price, and buy staples in the districts that have roads.