M’Bam regions, to historic shifts in cocoa production at department and
province levels. As long as the demographic pressure remains low in southern
Cameroon and migrants do not enter the region through a potential land mar-
ket, the cocoa agroforests have a good chance to survive. However, the model
may be difficult to reproduce if demographic pressure increases rapidly, unless
cocoa and noncocoa revenues from these agroforests can be increased.
Conclusions
Historically, cocoa has been an important source of tropical deforestation, and
it is still a nonnegligible one today. At the same time, it is a crop on which
many conservationists and natural resource managers base their hopes for an
agriculture that not only provides a living for tropical farmers but also helps
to conserve a degree of biodiversity in tropical forest landscapes. A critical
question is whether agroforestry practices can help stabilize cocoa growing sys-
tems and prevent the further move of this crop to new forest frontiers while
providing sustainable income to successive generations of tropical farmers.
In all three countries discussed in this chapter—the Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil,
and Cameroon—there are or were traditions of growing cocoa in agroforests.
Obviously, this fact did not prevent deforestation by cocoa farmers, but it
helped to slow down the process, at least in certain parts of these countries and
during certain periods, by extending the useful life of the cocoa tree and, crit-
ically, providing a basis for the replanting of cocoa after a period of forest fal-
low and thereby for more permanent cocoa systems. This basis was seriously
compromised when cocoa was cultivated in strict monoculture using more
destructive techniques of forest conversion, as in the case of the Côte d’Ivoire.
What is the future of the existing agroforests, and what are the chances of such
techniques being adopted in regions where cocoa is grown in monoculture?
Only preliminary answers can be given to these questions.
Complex cocoa agroforests have evolved under specific technological, eco-
nomic, social, and historical contexts. When these contexts change, as through
immigration, such traditional systems may become unstable. As we have seen
in the case study of the Côte d’Ivoire, several such changes may occur simul-
taneously. An important factor that has historically favored the development
of complex agroforests worldwide was the need to reduce labor costs when
establishing new plantations against a background of a low level of technology
and abundant land. By maintaining a large part of the forest trees, farmers
saved time for forest clearing and weed control. As land became less abundant
through immigration and more effective techniques of forest clearing became
available, important premises of complex cocoa agroforestry were lost. An
important factor in the move of the Ivorian and part of the Ghanaian cocoa
economies toward zero-shade systems and monocultures was the introduction
of new cocoa varieties that needed less shade and had a more rapid initial
- Chocolate Forests and Monocultures 129