rates of agroforest practices in most other regions where migrants dominate
the cocoa sector.
The End of the Cycle
The problem of the “Baoulé method” of forest conversion was that at the end
of the first cocoa cycle the forest rent had been consumed. When a cocoa farm
came to the end of its life cycle, which occurred more rapidly under unshaded
conditions, it was difficult to implement the shifting cultivation principle to
allow the establishment of a forest vegetation where, after some time, cocoa
could be conveniently replanted. Fewer forest trees could regenerate and grow
again. With or without the influence of droughts and accidental fires, these
old cocoa farms often turned into fallows dominated by the invasive shrub
Chromolaena odorata,where replanting of cocoa was difficult and mortality
high.
Case studies of Baoulé villages in the center-west of the country in the
1990s illustrate the end of a cocoa cycle. In this region around the town of
Gagnoa, the cocoa boom started in the mid- to late 1960s. In the 1970s and
early 1980s, the Baoulé migrants coming from the savanna areas in the
center-north were rightly considered the winners of the race for land and for-
est. In a village of Baoulé migrants, Petit Toumoudi, interviews with 10 farm-
ers in 1995 show a picture that is representative of the region. Most of the
farmers had arrived just before 1970. On the average, they received 9.7 ha of
forest and planted more than 90 percent of it (8.9 ha) with cocoa associated
with plantains. Severe mortality of the cocoa trees began in the drought year
1983 and continued in the following years. They tried to replant an average
of 1.5 ha, half of which did not survive. In 1995, 25 years after their arrival,
they ended up with 5.3 ha of low-yielding cocoa. Their comments turned
around the exhaustion of soils, indicated by the mortality of plantains, which
announced the upcoming mortality of the cocoa trees. They also mentioned
reduced and irregular rainfall, reflecting an increased duration of the dry sea-
son rather than a decrease in total annual rainfall but certainly also the drier
microclimate in the increasingly deforested region (Schroth et al. 1992; Ruf
1995; Léonard and Oswald 1996). They also complained about invasion of
weeds and epiphytes, and termites were destroying the cocoa trees. Although
they did not mention their age, all were older than 55 years and lacked the
labor force for successful replanting.
They also lacked the technique. Techniques that were extremely efficient
at forest times had become obsolete in the postforest era. Instead of efficient
ways to clear forest, a technique to get rid of the weed shrub Chromolaena
odorata,which had increasingly taken over the former space of the forest, was
needed. It was also increasingly difficult to control the weed pressure in young
and old plantations. Furthermore, fire had increasingly become a threat to the
118 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry