development, thereby reducing the attractiveness of extensive and labor-saving
agroforestry practices during the long investment phase. Furthermore, the use
of insecticides and later of mineral fertilizers gave an immediate advantage to
the monoculture system, and once these innovations had been adopted there
was even less incentive to adopt (or keep) agroforestry practices.
Despite the advantages of cocoa agroforests in terms of longevity of the
tree crops and ease of replanting, the chances of the traditional agroforestry
practices using primary forest trees as shade and forest fallows to facilitate
replanting probably are low in most regions, especially where demographic
pressure increases, unless strong incentives develop or are created for the main-
tenance or adoption of such systems (e.g., markets for the timber from forest
fallows, certification schemes). In many regions, the most promising option to
promote cocoa agroforestry probably is not so much to try to save the old for-
est trees in the remaining agroforests as to rebuild a new agroforestry tradition
based on the planting of valuable timber or other useful trees together with
cocoa.
The chance that these new agroforests will be adopted will increase with
their ability to provide higher and more stable income to farmers from both
cocoa and noncocoa products. Cocoa revenues from agroforests may increase
with the introduction of clonal materials resistant to major cocoa diseases, as
has recently started in Bahia (witches’ broom disease) and West Africa (Phy-
tophthorapod rot). Stable revenues cannot be obtained under conditions of
fluctuating cocoa prices without markets for noncocoa products, like those in
the Yaoundé area in southern Cameroon, leading to the diversification of
cocoa farms with fruit trees. In all tropical countries, the development of
urban markets will encourage this type of diversification on the plot and farm
scale.
Specifically in the Côte d’Ivoire, a hope for cocoa agroforestry is the open-
ing of the timber market to farmers in 1999, which legalizes the commercial-
ization of timber and makes it less subject to informal taxation. Once the
information about their new rights has reached the cocoa smallholders, which
is not the case yet, it should increase the attractiveness of managing trees in
cocoa farms. Whether this potential can be used to help establish more diver-
sified and potentially more sustainable cocoa systems will be highly instructive
for other African cocoa growing regions. The key factor in cocoa sustainabil-
ity is not necessarily longevity of the tree crop but successful replanting.
Replanting is costly, so it is important that at the end of the cocoa trees’ life
cycle there is capital that can be used to finance replanting, and this could be
provided by the trees. This idea is nothing new: “As cocoa plantations should
not live more than some twenty years, native people should be encouraged to
intercrop cocoa with other trees, every 15 meters, for instance with oil palms,
colas and avocados which provide them with valuable produce when the main
crop disappears” (Vuillet 1925, 5).
130 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry