A Forest for a Bottle of Gin: Migrants
and the Cocoa Boom of the Côte d’Ivoire
The history of cocoa in the Côte d’Ivoire began in the 1890s with a short-lived
cocoa boom in the extreme southwest of the country. Although economically
without much consequence, this local event is instructive because it proves
that early adoption sprang up as an indigenous process, not from colonial
policies (Chauveau and Léonard 1996). However, the base of the current Ivo-
rian cocoa economy was built in the eastern region after 1900. From 1910 to
the 1950s, cocoa spread in this region and some parts of the center-west,
mostly through micro–pioneer fronts. As the local farmers needed workers,
these first decades put the structure of migration in place. After 3–10 years of
good services as workers, many migrants could obtain land and become cocoa
smallholders. In turn, they also called for relatives and workers. Because of the
poverty in the neighboring savanna of the Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, a
large and cheap labor force was ready to be exploited.
In 1960 came the independence, with an Ivorian president who fully
understood the potential of combining this foreign labor force with the vast
Ivorian forest. Migrations and the opening of pioneer fronts were accelerated
by policies of declassifying forest reserves, distributing information, and open-
ing the borders for foreign labor. Logging companies and their tracks facili-
tated the move into the forests. The result was a sweep of the tropical forest
from east to west between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s. The migrants’
rush to the forest was strongly related to the low prices of forestland. In the
southwest of the country, where the last large cocoa pioneer front opened in
the late 1970s, some migrants could still obtain 25 or even 50 ha of primary
forest for a bottle of gin, 12 bottles of beer, and one piece of cloth. According
to a survey in 1998, with 1,000 cocoa farmers in the whole country, one-third
were indigenous farmers, one-third Ivorian migrants (coming from the
savanna in the center and north of the Côte d’Ivoire), and one-third foreign
migrants, mostly from Burkina Faso, with an average cocoa area of about 5.5
ha per household for all three groups (Legrand 1999).This points to the dom-
inating role of migration in the Ivorian cocoa boom and to the resulting
potential for conflict that finally erupted in civil war in September 2002.
From Agroforests to Monocultures: Agronomists, Migrants,
and Technological Change
The strong migrant component determined not only the speed with which
cocoa spread through the forest zone of the Côte d’Ivoire but also the way in
which cocoa was grown. Until the 1960s, most cocoa planters did not cut
down the biggest forest trees, at least not all of them. The undergrowth was cut
and burned, but some of the giant trees were maintained and formed the upper
114 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry