The Sonocusco province (in Mexico) was famous for its wealth
and prosperity, densely populated with Indians and much vis-
ited by Spaniard merchants for its abundant cocoa production
and its important trade that followed from it. There are now
very few Indians. It is said that there are less than two thousand
and that cocoa trade is disappearing, moving to another
province, farther on the track to Guatemala. (Alonso Ponce,
1586, quoted by Touzard 1993, 53)
In Côte d’Ivoire, cocoa cultivation is rare today between Abid-
jan and Abengourou, the region where the cocoa industry was
born. In the Abengourou region itself, production has declined
for the last 12 years to 6,000 tonnes from approximately
22,000. One can see abandoned farms everywhere. Production
is shifting to the interior toward Dimbokro and Gagnoa, where
new virgin forest lands are cleared. (FAO 1957, 16–17)One may add that Dimbokro, the heart of the Ivorian cocoa belt in the
1960s, already ended its cocoa cycle in the early 1980s, when the crop moved
further to the west, mostly to Soubré. Cocoa has thus been moving around the
world for the last four centuries, in most cases at the expense of tropical
forests. What are the factors that drove these cycles?
Cheap Labor and Forestland:
Ingredients of Cocoa Booms
Throughout the world, most tree crop booms have been made possible
through a combination of migrations and deforestation. Migrations result
from the presence of large and mobile populations not too far from sparsely
populated forest. Such a mobile work force was available in the savanna zone
of West Africa to supply the cocoa booms in the Côte d’Ivoire in the 1960s to
1980s, for example, and on the densely populated southern part of Sulawesi
and Bali to supply the cocoa boom in Sulawesi in the 1990s. Cheap land in
sparsely populated forest zones provides a strong pull factor to poverty-
stricken farmers in the source areas of such migrations; for example, in
Indonesia in the 1980s, by selling a quarter of a hectare of paddy terraces in
his village in Bali, a migrant could buy at least 10 ha of land suitable for cocoa
planting in the forested plains of central Sulawesi.
Access for migrants to virgin forest areas (and subsequent transport of agri-
cultural produce to markets) is facilitated when logging companies construct
roads and open tracks into the forest, especially if they are subsequently main-
tained by public investments (lack of these may have saved logged forests in
parts of Cameroon from immigration; J. Gockowski, pers. comm., 2003).
Government policies also strongly influenced the pace of migration. Before
110 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry