Across West and Central Africa’s tropical agricultural belt — and one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots — cacao farming has taken off as demand for chocolate rises in the Global North.
The nearly $9 billion cacao bean industry satiates sweet tooths across Europe and North America with roughly 5 million tons of cacao beans every year.
Now, research finds that higher profits from cacao farming in the Congo Basin’s TRIDOM landscape — which spans Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo — are linked to seven times more deforestation than other livelihoods. The study was published in PLOS One.
“My main aim was to understand … what is the linkage between the livelihood of the population that are living in this landscape, and then the global agenda of protecting forests and also reducing the greenhouse gas emissions related to deforestation?” said Denis Sonwa, an ecologist and co-author of the study who was at the Center for International Forestry Research before the study was published. (Sonwa is now a research director focused on Africa at the World Resources Institute.)
The study also showed that rising demand for cocoa implies the most successful farmers will clear more land — even though that land is low-yielding.
“It’s the demand that’s driving deforestation, even at the expense of having lower yields,” said Tim Searchinger, the technical director for agriculture, forestry and ecosystems at World Resources Institute and senior research scholar at Princeton University, who was not involved in the study.
Cash-crop prices fluctuate a lot, he explained, making cacao farming an unstable way to earn an entire livelihood. That pressure would naturally influence a farmer to clear more land to meet the global demand for cocoa.
Meanwhile, large chocolate companies and the European Union have set standards for the beans they import, requiring ethically sourced beans that haven’t caused deforestation. But those countries have a disproportionately higher carbon footprint than those that are producing cacao.
“We are all responsible, but we are not responsible in the same magnitude,” Sonwa told Mongabay, raising concerns about climate justice.
Climate change has triggered a coffee and cocoa conundrum
The Congo Basin is also the world’s largest carbon sink, absorbing an estimated 1.5 billion tons of carbon each year. Deforestation releases stored carbon and reduces the number of intact trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
“We are underestimating the role of agriculture in causing deforestation,” Searchinger said.
Agriculture-induced deforestation extends beyond the Congo Basin. Global trade in agricultural commodities drives an estimated 90% of deforestation around the world and more than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Cacao and agroforestry
Agroforestry, a farming technique that integrates trees, has been used and promoted around the world to grow commercially valuable crops while protecting the environment and reducing poverty. Using native trees and shrubs as buffers and shade for crops, the system is hailed as a way to foster local wildlife habitat, purify soil and water and make use of other products like firewood or medicinal plants.
Yet some of the most common crops grown with agroforestry — cacao, coffee, oil palm and rubber included — are also some of the most destructive to forests. Agroforestry itself doesn’t make it inherently better for the environment than other methods, Searchinger explained.
“For agroforestry to be a solution, it has to replace some of the food produced by non-forest-based crops,” he said, citing silvopastoral farming systems in Colombia where forestry and cattle ranching are successfully reducing deforestation.
Across Africa, low yields are the main barrier to food security, Searchinger said, adding that the population in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to increase from 1.1-2.1 billion in the next 28 years. “If you want to feed the population without massive deforestation, let alone improve the food, you have to increase yields,” he said.
One way to do that is by diversifying crops, suggested Ingrid Epezagne, an agribusiness consultant and director for the African Agribusiness Incubator Network who is based in Côte D’Ivoire, the world leader in cacao production. Epezagne and other consultants are now recommending that Ivorian farmers grow cassava alongside cacao. That way, if cacao prices or yields go down, farmers can grow their own food or sell it locally.
“We should be educating the farmers about the whole value chain,” Epezagne said. Farmers often think that market prices are what they will receive for their yields. In reality, “they are the bottom,” she said, receiving only a small portion of the cacao’s value.
Indeed, the study found that an extra dollar earned from cacao is roughly sevenfold more destructive than a dollar earned from subsistence crops. Because cash crops are perceived as lucrative, more people want to take advantage of the opportunity to make money, attracting new farmers to previously uncultivated land.
“There is this, should I say, fake perception about the whole industry,” Epezagne said. “They don’t really understand that the people that are actually making money are those big companies that produce chocolate.”
As the leading importer of cacao beans worldwide, the European Union wields a heavy hand in the global market for cacao beans, influencing what farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are paid for their yields. At the same time, the European Union has also implemented high standards for its bean imports.
“My view is that cocoa companies should essentially take responsibility for ensuring that as their demand for cocoa grows, their demand can be met by increasing yields on existing farms,” Searchinger said, such as by paying for resources like co-ops and extension agents to help farmers grow more abundantly and efficiently.
Chocolate companies say they prioritize climate change and deforestation. On the ground, however, farmers in cacao-producing countries are keeping their children as farm hands instead of sending them to school in an attempt to grow more beans and earn more money, Epezagne explained.
“It’s just a show,” she said. “If the people stop farming, that is not good for those big multinational companies. They still need the cocoa.”
Another way to boost farmers’ livelihoods, she suggested, would be to process cacao locally. Otherwise, farmers only earn money for exporting the raw product. Factories in Cote d’Ivoire are now starting to do this, but for smaller cacao-producing countries like Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo, “we could also explore very small food processing units that agriculture cooperatives [and] farmers could come together and use to add value to the cocoa,” Epezagne said.
The Cameroonian government aims to increase cacao production from roughly 300,000 tons to 640,000 annually by 2030, the study authors write. But for this to be achievable, Epezagne argued that national governments need to support farmers without encouraging deforestation to meet the demand.
Epezagne called for better climate policies at the national level and better incentives for farmers to follow best practices, such as discouraging slash-and-burn practices.
“When you tell them what you are doing is not the right thing to do, you should give [them] another option, because they are surviving,” she said. “If they have no other options, they will keep doing it.”
Environmentally harmful practices like burning and clear-cutting continue for that reason. But there are plenty of other options that don’t require land expansion, she said, such as diversification of cash and subsistence crops, crop rotations, and farming on the same plot of land to recycle nutrients.
Meanwhile, climate change is challenging farming practices in unprecedented ways, even in the tropical Congo Basin. Seasonal extremes — such as drier dry seasons and rainier wet seasons — have increased the risk of crop diseases and pests that can further reduce farmers’ profits, Sonwa added.
“Our study is very useful for the TRIDOM [area], but also for the other tropical regions of the world that may face similar situations,” Sonwa said, such as Indonesia or the Amazon. Studying the TRIDOM landscape collectively, rather than individual countries, emphasized how policies need to go beyond national borders, he added.
“The fact that the [Congo] is a carbon sink means that this region is really playing an important role,” Sonwa said. “The international community cannot forget this.”
