Agriculture and Environment: Cocoa

Better Management Practices: Encourage full-sun cocoa on degraded lands

Another way to avoid forest degradation is to change the architecture and planting density through the use of full-sun cocoa.

This will only work, however, if trees are planted on existing or degraded agricultural lands rather than newly cleared forests or existing shade cocoa systems. High-density planting is more efficient. In effect, higher yields can be achieved on previously degraded areas without any further impacts on soil fertility or habitat loss.

While cocoa production has been promoted in many countries around the world, the technology being used is the low-density technology that achieves yields of, at best, only 1.5 metric tons per hectare. There are, however, new production technologies that allow those levels to be doubled, or even tripled, to as much as 4.5 metric tons per hectare per year. This strategy is not very expensive.

Full-sun cocoa utilizes newer, more compact varieties whose vertical trunks are the primary fruit bearing areas of the plant, rather than the horizontal branches. These shorter, grafted planted plants produce more quickly. Pruning allows producers to keep the plants short so that pesticide sprays are more effective. Productivity falls off sharply after about 10 years, but if rotated with other crops this system can be used to prevent conversion of natural habitat.

These technologies have been developed and are used by some competitive, private companies. Their strategy is to increase production to the point that labour costs are not as significant a factor in their economic viability. However, labour costs on full-sun cocoa plantations have been reported to be 70% higher than on conventional systems (Chok 2001). This means that increased productivity is required to offset such costs.

Larger companies adopting this technology, however, may be swimming upstream. Smaller producers using the same techniques could easily undermine the larger companies because they do not rely on the use of paid labour. Unfortunately, the technology has not filtered down to the small producers yet.

This is an important bottleneck that could be addressed through the provision of grafted stock and overall production packages to small-scale producers. One place where this is happening currently is in Vietnam, where the government has set up thousands of nurseries to provide grafted cocoa seedlings to coffee producers.

Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world, but its production has helped trigger the lowest real producer coffee prices ever. Many coffee producers want to shift production to another crop. It is not clear, however, whether such a dramatic increase in production of cocoa in those areas would not cause a similarly dramatic drop in cocoa prices.