Agriculture and Environment: Cocoa

Better Management Practices: Shape the Expansion & Maintain the Viability of Shade Cocoa

In the near future, unless full-sun cocoa can be produced on existing or degraded agricultural areas, it is likely that cocoa production will continue to expand into existing forests.

In these instances, expansion should be encouraged in ways that will reduce its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functions as well as ensure the financial viability of the industry over time.

For example, land use planning and zoning should be undertaken in consideration of what is known about how cocoa can be best produced, over time, with better practices that have already been identified by growers.

Cocoa can also be grown in association with other taller, commercially valuable trees. Cocoa has been grown on vast plantations of coconut, rubber, and oil palm trees. In these systems, the highest price commodity gets the most attention and the others tend to be left to fend for themselves. In many of these systems, since cocoa is often not the principal focus of many large-scale producers, it is often neglected.

In other large-scale agriculture or aquaculture production systems, owners and managers have found that making line workers responsible for specific plots and giving financial rewards to them for increased net profits on their areas can increase profitability as much as fourfold.

Such "win-win" incentive programs should be adopted in cocoa production as well. Without such innovations, large-scale producers can never hope to compete with small-scale producers who use unpaid family labour to support their production.

Small-scale growers, however, have a different perspective; cocoa is grown together with other crops with the same care. This strategy would be improved if a more integrated system could be constructed that provides both food and cash crops while utilizing family labour rather than expensive inputs.

The areas of greatest concern and the areas where strategies may be more successful, however, are those where there are still considerable forested areas suitable for the cultivation of cocoa and where the industry may try to expand.

For instance, Cameroon has only 0.5 million hectares of forests converted to cocoa production, but an additional 2.5 million hectares of forest land suitable for cocoa. The maintenance of a relatively stable level of production somewhat masks the geographic shift in cultivation from the central and southern regions of the country to the southwest where productivity continues to grow.

Unfortunately, the southeast is among the most biodiverse regions in the country. Efforts to stem this shift in production will need to begin immediately and must address the root causes for the shifts in cocoa production, namely, loss of productivity in converted lands in other parts of West Africa.