And for farmers like Issouf Kabe Coulibaly, that's a welcome reversal of fortunes.

"Last year we had a disease in the cotton called jassid, which really devastated all our cotton crops, so we had no cotton last year."

The Indian cotton jassid appeared as if from nowhere across much of West and Central Africa's cotton belt.

The tiny, grasshopper-like pest injects a toxin into the plant that led to a near-25% production slump in the 2022-2023 season year-on-year.

Some countries lost over half their forecast harvest.

This season, the use of rapidly-trialed and approved new insecticides have kept jassid at bay.

Yaridiouma Soro says that last season his harvest was around two-thirds smaller than usual.

"If the medicine hadn't worked, we wouldn't have had enough cotton this year. Thank God, we think a solution has been found. Even if the jassid disease still exists this year, it is late on our cotton, and we already have succeeded in our harvest."

The crisis has highlighted a regional vulnerability to invasive species.

But it has also emphasized a reliance on chemical solutions.

Research shows that such pesticides will not protect crops in the long term.

Kossonou Falese is an agricultural advisor in the Korhogo district.

''Any product that is used on a pest over a long period of time, if there is no improvement in the product, at some point the pest will develop resistance to it."

Known cases of resistance in the jassid have been reported in India and Pakistan, according to an industry group.

But in Ivory Coast farmers need to balance the long term consequences of pesticide use with the short term need to put food on the table.

Thierry Brevault, of French agricultural research center CIRAD, said farmers could not afford to lose another 30-50% of production - and that insecticides were "the obvious choice".

But, he warned, eventually these products won't work.

He said the priority should be measures including developing pest-resistant cotton varieties and learning how to tackle jassids at different parts of their life cycle.

Without such long term solutions, researchers warn that West Africa's cotton bounce may be short-lived.