05Côte d’Ivoire
1,850,000 bags (ICO 2009)In-depth country profile: production, varieties, classification, history, current situation and points still uncertain. Region: Africa.
Côte d'Ivoire was for a long time the world's leading producer of canephora. That is no longer the case: producers turned to crops judged more profitable (cocoa, rice, rubber) and Asia's rise did the rest. The country is now 4th in the world for canephora.
Nearly 300,000 families still grow coffee, grouped in cooperatives, but the orchards are aging: a good part of the coffee trees are past twenty-five years, without being replaced. A national program is trying to revive the sector, by replanting and working on quality.
- Botanical species
- Canephora
- Varieties
- Kouillou, Niaouli, Conillon, Petit Indénié
- Altitude
- 100 to 400 m
- Soil type
- Clayey-siliceous
- Shade
- Fruit and forest trees
- Harvest
- Manual, non-selective
- Processing
- Dry process only
- Preparation
- Electronic
- Harvest period
- November to April
- Packaging
- 60-kg bag
The official criteria are the number of defects and bean size, grouped under the notion of grade.
| Grade | Screen | Max defects |
| Grade 1 | 16/18 | 60 |
| Grade 2 | 14/16 | 90 |
| Grade 3 | 12/14 | 120 |
| Grade 4 | 10/12 | Not specified |
History
In 1918, Côte d'Ivoire exported 66,358 pounds of coffee. That is derisory next to Angola's ten and a half million.
Everything was decided afterward, and the turning point comes down to a plant. Canephora of the Guinean group was successfully planted in the 1920s in Côte d'Ivoire and Madagascar. It is called Kouilou, after a river in Gabon where the species grows wild.
From this success came the rank the country would hold for a long time: world's leading producer of canephora.
Ukers 1922, ch. XXII, p. 289-291 (exports of the producing countries), p. 291; World Coffee Research, Coffee Varieties Catalog 2025, Kouilou Niaouli / Petit Indénié profileCôte d'Ivoire is also one of the rare places where the behavior of the coffee plant has been quantified. Roland Portères measured there the effect of wind on the plant, and the reaction time of the coffee plant to rain; these Ivorian measurements remain among the most cited agronomic data on the species. The country also received liberica in 1932, and it keeps old records on the distribution of stenophylla, a species long reported extinct.
Portères, cited by Coste 1955; LC ch. 2 and 4Today
The volume at the head of the profile, 1,850,000 bags, is that of the profile (ICO 2009). The country is no longer first: it has dropped to fourth place worldwide for canephora, as producers turned to cocoa, rice and rubber, judged more profitable, while Asia took its place. Nearly 300,000 families still grow coffee, in cooperatives, between 100 and 400 meters, with non-selective manual harvesting and the dry process only.
Country Profiles, Marco De Sousa Rosa, 2026The central problem is the age of the orchard: a good part of the coffee trees are over twenty-five years old and have not been replaced. A national program of replanting and work on quality is trying to revive the sector.
Country Profiles, Marco De Sousa Rosa, 2026Gray areas
- The year in which Côte d'Ivoire lost its rank as the world's leading canephora producer is not established by the sources consulted.
- No production volume after 2009 could be sourced.
- The details of the national replanting program (dates, areas, financing) are not documented by any source in the corpus.
- The varieties cited by the profile (Kouillou, Niaouli, Conillon, Petit Indénié) are commercial names for canephora populations, whose exact genetic boundaries are not settled.