farmers in the Soubré region in the center-west of the Côte d’Ivoire in the
1990s. Already in the 1960s, agronomists had classified this region as unsuit-
able for cocoa because of its stony soils. Migrants did not know that and
would not have cared. In the 1970s and 1980s, they rushed into the region by
the tens of thousands, and in the late 1980s it became the new cocoa belt of
the country, taking over from the Dimbokro-Bonguanou region further to the
east. In the early 1990s, a huge number of farmers rediscovered what agrono-
mists had said earlier: they started suffering yield declines and sharp increases
in tree mortality. Poor soils in combination with strict monoculture acceler-
ated the local cocoa cycle, and 15-year-old cocoa trees looked like trees of
twice that age in the eastern region. In the mid-1990s, many cocoa plots had
already disappeared. The migrants had only two alternatives: move to new
forests further to the west or find a solution on site to slow down the death of
their cocoa farms. It is well established that shading reduces nutritional stress
in cocoa trees, so one could have again imagined the adoption of shade trees
to improve the nutritional status of the cocoa trees and a gradual transition to
agroforestry practices. Instead, at a time when extension services had largely
disappeared, the farmers found mineral fertilizers. Although the use of fertil-
izers did not sustain individual farms over decades, it increased yields (possi-
bly doubled them) and thereby gave the farmers an incentive to stay on their
farms rather than move into new forests. This temporary solution to the local
cocoa crisis may seem less satisfactory in environmental terms than the adop-
tion of agroforestry practices. However, it played a decisive role in delaying a
further shift of the cocoa production areas and thereby helped to increase the
sustainability of cocoa growing on a regional scale.
Present Trends: Are Ivorian Cocoa Farmers Prepared to Adopt
Agroforest Practices?
A trip through the former forest zone of the Côte d’Ivoire with some attention
paid to landscapes shows a trend of decreasing shade density in cocoa from
east to west. Preliminary survey results at the farm plot level in three villages
indicate that large forest trees are present in cocoa plots at a density of about
five trees per hectare in the east, two trees per hectare in the center-west, and
less than one tree per hectare in the southwest (Delerue 2003). This decrease
in the use of shade from east to west reflects the increasing dominance of the
cocoa sector by migrants, who tend to use less shade than indigenous farmers
(Table 6.3). In the east, indigenous farmers kept immigration under control,
whereas in the western region migrants locally represent 80–99 percent of the
farmer population.
For both indigenous farmers and migrants, most of the noncocoa trees in
the farm plots are planted or spontaneous fruit trees rather than forest trees
(Table 6.3), mainly oil palms, cola, orange, and avocado trees, around 20 trees
122 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry