Agroforestry and Biodiversity Conservation in Tropical Landscapes

Chapter 6

Chocolate Forests and Monocultures:

A Historical Review of Cocoa Growing

and Its Conflicting Role in Tropical

Deforestation and Forest Conservation

François Ruf and Götz Schroth

An American scientist who visited southern Bahia on the southeastern coast of
Brazil in the 1950s captured the impression that the cocoa cropping systems
of that region, locally known as cabruca cocoa, made on him in the following
words: “Only slowly does the initiate become aware that this ‘forest,’ and the
‘forest’ that had appeared as formidable to him in the latter stages of his trip
into the cacao region is that same huge orchard which he had sought from the
air and from the truck window. He learns to recognise the tall trees as jungle
trees left during the clearing of the land as shade for the low cocoa trees”
(Leeds 1957, 41). These chocolate forests (Johns 1999), created by under-
planting selectively thinned natural forest with cocoa trees (Theobroma cacao),
not only protect the tree crops from climatic hazards and pests and increase
their longevity but also conserve some of the characteristics of the original for-
est, including part of its biodiversity. As agricultural land use, including cocoa
cultivation, has transformed the formerly vast and highly diversified Atlantic
rainforest into isolated fragments in an agriculturally dominated landscape,
the potential role of the cabruca agroforests for the conservation of biodiver-
sity has increasingly attracted the attention of conservationists and natural
resource managers: “In Southern Bahia, the merits of the cabruca cacao is that
the system allows economical development while maintaining a portion of the
original forest diversity and thus preserving wildlife” (Alves 1990, 136).
In 1996, local authorities and the scientific community used the Interna-
tional Cocoa Research Conference at Salvador de Bahia to develop an image
of tradition, culture, and environmental protection around the cabruca cocoa
farms after the slump in cocoa prices in the late 1980s and the arrival of the

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