An inconvenience of the traditional agroforest method is delayed returns,
as heavy shade slows down the growth of the tree crops. On the other hand,
shading prolongs the useful life of the cocoa farm. Also, that shading protects
cocoa trees from insect pests has been known in West Africa at least since the
early twentieth century, when on the islands of Fernando Pó and São Tomé
attempts to increase cocoa yields by drastically thinning the shade canopy
resulted in complete crop failure (Gordon 1976, cited in Johns 1999). Fur-
thermore, the almost intact root systems of the forest trees allowed the even-
tual regrowth of the forest. Thirty years after the establishment of the cocoa
trees, this system favored a strategy of abandoning the farm and leaving shade
trees and forest regrowth to develop freely. The old cocoa farm then became a
secondary forest where successful replanting was almost guaranteed. As already
understood by Blankenbourg in the 1960s (cited in Ruthenberg 1980), this
was nothing else than the shifting cultivation principle applied to a perennial
crop. Initially it consumed forest, but once it was established for a given pop-
ulation, it could theoretically rotate on its own tree crop-fallow land without
affecting surrounding forest. Had this type of rotational agroforest practice
caught on throughout the forest belt of the Côte d’Ivoire, its landscape would
now be different. Why did this not happen?
In the subsequent transformation of the cocoa-growing method, the
research and extension services that favored zero-shading from the early 1970s
until the late 1990s in the Côte d’Ivoire, as in most other countries (but see
Cameroon later in this chapter), played a significant role. A contributing fac-
tor in this philosophy was the replacement since the early to mid-1970s of the
old amelonado cocoa varieties, locally known as cacao français, by a new
planting material, the upper amazons and hybrids of upper amazons, locally
called cacao Ghana. The vigor of the new varieties seemed to be better
expressed with little or no shade.
However, the most important driver of the changing cocoa-growing prac-
tices was the demographic and social change. Up to the mid-1960s, most
cocoa farmers were indigenous forest people who applied the type of forest
clearing that they knew from shifting cultivation to their tree crops. There
were very few migrants in the forest zone before that time. In the 1970s and
1980s, however, rural populations in the parts of the forest zone where actual
booms were taking place kept growing at rates of 10–20 percent per year
through immigration (Direction des Grands Travaux 1992). This social land-
slide was followed by a technical one, a simultaneous adoption of a labor-
saving technology to remove forest trees.
The Baoulé migrants, the most dynamic of the savanna people streaming
into the forest, introduced a technique of killing big trees by gathering
undergrowth around them and keeping it ablaze over a few days; the trees
then fell apart over the next few years. This was much more labor efficient
and far less dangerous than cutting them with axes, often from a platform
116 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry