As Côte d’Ivoire’s forests decline under cocoa expansion, researchers explore adoption barriers

In Côte d’Ivoire, chocolate means much more than a simple snack. The cocoa sector employs two-thirds of the country’s active population – entailing at least 843,798 smallholders and supporting six million people. Its cultivation takes up forty percent of the country’s export crop area – much of which is characterized by input-heavy full-sun monocrops. 

With prices fluctuating and productivity declining due to changing climatic conditions and unsustainable agricultural practices, thousands of smallholder farmers are expanding their operations in a bid to grow more cocoa – often into forests and protected areas. Cocoa plantations have increased their spread by 44 percent since 1995 to an estimated current total of 3.52 million hectares. Meanwhile, in 2020 – according to the National Forest and Wildlife Inventory (IFFN) – forest cover hit an all-time-low, at 9.2 percent of the country’s total area.

As Côte d’Ivoire’s precious remaining forests continue to decline, agroforestry offers a safe, healthy, and sustainable alternative. Trees provide shade to young cocoa seedlings, which increases their survival rates and improves the soil’s chemical and physical properties – as well as enhancing its biodiversity. Cocoa agroforestry can also enhance the efficiency of cocoa farms through pest and disease reduction, soil fertility improvement, and yield and profit increase. Shaded cocoa also plays an important role in promoting biodiversity conservation, landscape connectivity, and restoration of abandoned or degraded land.

Despite these benefits, uptake of the practice in Côte d’Ivoire’s smallholder-heavy cocoa sector has been relatively slow. A new study by researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research–World Agroforestry Centre (CIFOR-ICRAF), the Institut National Polytechnique Felix Houphouet-Boigny (INP-HB), and the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), sought to work out what might be getting in the way.

The researchers carried out a survey of 910 households in south-eastern Côte d’Ivoire. They found that some farmers were uncertain about their legal rights to tree ownership, which gave them less interest in growing trees on their cocoa farms. Farmers who were not Ivorian citizens were similarly reluctant, due to laws barring them from owning land. “The willingness to adopt agroforestry is subjected to several conditions, relying chiefly on the existence of a formal Memorandum of Agreement with the authorities in charge of the management of forests, which will protect their right and ownership over the planted or protected trees in compliance of the new forest code,” said Allegra Kouassi, a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning manager at CIFOR-ICRAF, who co-authored the paper. Gender, age, migration status, the use of wood energy, and the presence of on-farm tree species, were also found to be key factors in driving the adoption of agroforestry practices.

The study found, however, that cocoa agroforestry is likely to be adopted by many cocoa growers in the area. Some farmers are already integrating exotic fruit trees into their plantation, including Persea americana, Mangifera indica, Citrus sinensis, Citrus reticulata and Psidium guajava; endogenous nuts such as Cola nitida, Ricinodendron heudelotii and Irvingia gabonensis; and timber tree species, namely Milicia excelsa, Terminalia superba, Terminalia ivorensis, Pycnanthus angolense, Antiaris africana and Entandrophragma utile.

The researchers expressed hope that Ivorian farmers would follow in the footsteps of those in Cameroon and Costa Rica, where cocoa agroforestry has successfully been used to restore degraded cocoa landscapes and sustainably stabilize cocoa production. “As one of the most effective nature-based solutions to address global change issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss, food and nutrition insecurity, and rural poverty,” they said, “cocoa agroforestry seems the best-fit cropping practice capable of addressing the multiple challenges the current cocoa supply chain is facing.”

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