that allowed them to attack the stem above the buttresses, as had been done
previously. Along with the cocoa trees the migrants planted their staple food
crop, yams, which necessitated intensive soil tillage and further reduced the
chance of the forest to regenerate, instead of upland rice, which was grown
by the locals and entailed little disturbance of the forest soil (de Rouw
1987).
The new technique of forest conversion served a strategy of rapidly plant-
ing cocoa trees to mark land ownership instead of spending a lot of time cut-
ting the forest trees and clearing the plot (Figure 6.2). The intensive burning
of biomass, soil tillage, and opening of the canopy also accelerated the initial
growth of the cocoa trees and provided rapid financial returns: whereas the
indigenous method took 5 years until the first cocoa yield and produced 500
kg of cocoa per hectare after 10 years, with the no-shade system the tree crops
started to produce within 3 years and yielded close to 1 metric ton of cocoa
per hectare at 6–7 years. The migrants thought in terms of quick planting and
quick returns. Also, the social and demographic pressure brought by the
immigrations rapidly erased any chance of implementing the traditional,
extensive tree crop–fallow rotation. Where cocoa was booming, there was no
space for cocoa fallows, and abandoning a farm for 5–10 years would have
provoked claims on the land by indigenous people. These factors explain why
complex agroforests were not an option for the migrants in the Côte d’Ivoire
when they started the cocoa cycle and also helps to explain the low adoption
- Chocolate Forests and Monocultures 117
Figure 6.2. Young cocoa farm established after killing most of the forest trees in the
southwest of the Côte d’Ivoire.