In the same tone, Delawarde (1935) wrote about Martinique Island in the
seventeenth century: “In the mountains, cacao cultures grow to produce much
profit. However, the factor of success, new soil, is a transitory one. The
colonists did not fertilise the soil, they used it up and then planted elsewhere
(p. 103).”
As mentioned before, the existence of a forest rent is not specific to cocoa.
Lower labor inputs for planting on virgin forestland compared with replant-
ing have been reported for rubber trees in Sumatra (Gouyon 1995), and early
colonists of the Atlantic rainforest region of Brazil believed that coffee and
even sugarcane find optimum growth conditions only on recently cleared
forestland (Dean 1995). The difference is that whereas rubber, coffee, and sug-
arcane are routinely replanted throughout the tropics today, in many regions
replanting of old cocoa remains a difficult task even for modern agronomists.
This is especially so where during boom times soils unsuitable for the demand-
ing cocoa trees have been used for planting, as has occurred in many places in
the western Côte d’Ivoire, in Nigeria (Ekanade 1985), and in Sulawesi (Ruf
and Yoddang 2001).
These technical difficulties of replanting old cocoa are compounded by
social and economic factors. For the first generation of cocoa farmers who
have arrived in a region, replanting often turns out not to be economically fea-
sible at a time of declining returns and increasing costs caused by the aging of
the plantation. Furthermore, the tree life cycle interacts with the life cycle of
its owner, his or her family, and the community. Migrants involved in cocoa
planting often are young, and often all planters in a particular zone have
arrived together during a brief period of time, and so they all age along with
their farms. When replanting time comes, the farmers lack the necessary labor
force, especially if they have sent their children to school. As the yields from
the aging plantations decline, family size and consumption increase, which
further limits the ability to invest in replanting. Conflicts between potential
inheritors often aggravate the degradation of the farms by postponing invest-
ment decisions.
These factors can be compounded by ecological change such as the arrival
of new diseases and fluctuating climatic conditions. Eastern Ghana was the
main cocoa belt of the country in the 1930s and still an important one in the
1950s. However, as the region was struck by the swollen shoot virus, soil
exhaustion, and declining annual rainfalls, its cocoa economy collapsed, and
the main center of cocoa production shifted into the virgin forests of western
Ghana, whereas the former cocoa belt turned into an oil palm and citrus belt
(Amanor and Diderutuah 2001).
With this background, we will now discuss in some detail the cocoa his-
tory of the world’s leading cocoa producer, the Côte d’Ivoire, before consider-
ing more briefly two regions where particularly complex cocoa agroforests
have developed, Bahia and Cameroon.
- Chocolate Forests and Monocultures 113