The book, Tree Commodities and Resilient Green Economies in Africa, was launched on 19 July 2022 at the 5th World Congress on Agroforestry in Quebec, Canada and online.

The book’s 30 chapters by 55 authors showcase best practices for tree-crop commodities and how they can contribute to sustainable development in Africa.

Tree-crop commodities highlighted are coffee, cocoa, cashew, palm oil, shea butter and rubber. These commodities are major sources of income for more than 30 million smallholders in Africa. They also represent some of the fastest-growing land uses and constitute an essential part of the continent’s domestic and export economies. At least ten countries — Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Uganda and Tanzania — are dependent on single tree-commodities.

Tree Commodities and Resilient Green Economics examines how best such tree commodities can contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa.

In the humid tropics, a ready market environment for export-oriented tree crops could lead to farming systems generating large income for farmers. In West Africa, this has been the case for cocoa, contributing to more than 90% of the monetary revenue in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Further still, there is evidence that Africa captures very little of the total value of the commodities’ value chains. For example, Africa produces 75% of the world’s cocoa but captures less than 15% of the total market value of the commodity.

Global demand for these commodities continues to soar but opportunities for expansion of land area is also limited, necessitating innovations in the production systems. In recent years, tree-crop plantations have rapidly expanded in Africa’s subtropical regions, contributing to land intensification that can help reduce pressures on natural forests globally.

However, their expansion also possesses multiple economic, social and environmental challenges, such as unfair competition between large plantations and smallholders, productivity gaps, the impact of the climate crisis, poor market access, declining productivity and fluctuating prices. There is also evidence that these commodity systems have flourished at the expense of forests and come with several other externalities: social (for example, land conflicts, land grabbing) and environmental (for example, biodiversity loss, including soil micro-organisms, and impact on human health from pesticides and greenhouse-gas emissions).

The climate crisis, in turn, poses a significant threat to some of the commodities in parts of Africa.

Innovations at large scale will be needed for these systems to respond effectively to the climate crisis as well as the social, economic and other environmental challenges. The book aims to understand innovative options that hold potential to ensure local populations can reap economic and other livelihoods’ benefits while maintaining ecosystem services and social integrity.

The authors focus on the six essential tree commodities, combining a case-study approach with perspectives on innovation from across the continent. Several case studies feature production, market and economic, environmental and policy innovation pathways. Lessons are drawn from Latin America and Asia. The language is aimed at a non-specialist audience for evaluating and designing existing or new public-sector responses, civil-society involvement and private-sector initiatives.

‘There have been various principles for responsible investments and finance that have been gradually emerging to influence large-scale development and monitoring frameworks to reduce the foreseen negative impacts,’ said Peter A. Minang, lead author and CIFOR-ICRAF’s director for Africa. ‘Trade-offs and the effectiveness of such solutions largely depend on the commodity value-chain, access to resources, the scale of production and producers’ organizational capacities. Work in these areas will lead to recommendations for national and sub-national government systems aiming to improve productivity and resilience of production systems and enable factors for sustainable private and public investments and development.’

Part 1 presents the motivations for the book, reviews the place of tree commodities in African economies and sets out a multi-dimensional integrated framework for sustainable tree commodities. Part 2 showcases commodity-based case studies from a systems’ innovation perspective. Parts 3, 4 and 5 examine economic, environmental and governance innovation options, respectively. In Part 6, the book presents lessons from across Asia and Latin America that could help create ‘green’ tree commodities. Part 7 teases out emerging lessons from the book and envisages possible ways forward. It closes with a vision for tree commodities in Africa.

‘With several initiatives already in place to manage the challenges associated with the expansion of plantations and to address the gaps in performance, we hope that this book will help governments both at the national and sub-national levels, and others, including farmers, to understand the available options,’ said Lalisa Duguma, a co-author and senior scientist with Sustainable Landscapes at CIFOR-ICRAF. ‘Then we hope they will be inspired to plan for diverse plantation systems that reduce the ever-growing pressures on forests and increase the contribution of plantations towards a sustainable food supply, poverty alleviation and socio-economic resilience.’

Read the book

Minang PA, Duguma LA, van Noordwijk M, eds. 2021. Tree commodities and resilient green economies in Africa. Nairobi, Kenya: World Agroforestry (ICRAF).