Ivory Coast seeks to save forests from illegal cocoa boom

In Mont Peko National Park, thousands of leafless Iroko and Samba trees tower over a sea of lush plantations like headstones, a testament to the heavy environmental cost Ivory Coast has paid for a dramatic rise in its cocoa production.

Ivorian officials say 99 per cent of the park’s 34,000 hectares have been destroyed by cocoa farmers taking advantage of the chaos wrought by a decade-long political crisis in the West African nation.

With the years of turmoil over, the government is preparing to re-exert state authority by expelling tens of thousands of farmers from parks and reserves in an attempt to save the dwindling forests.

Mont Peko, with an illegal population of around 28,000, will prove the first test of the government’s new policy. Evictions are slated for December and similar operations will follow in Ivory Coast’s more than 200 parks and reserves.

“The role of a national park is not to produce cocoa,” said Adama Tondossama, Director of the OIPR, one of the government agencies charged with managing protected land.

Ivory Coast produced 1.2 million tonnes (mt) of cocoa in the 2000/01 season, a year before a failed coup attempt sparked a civil war that split the country in half. In the recently ended 2014/15 season, it harvested a record crop of around 1.8 mt or some 40 per cent of world supply. At a time when the industry is seeking to tap potential new markets in Asia, any major drop in production from Ivory Coast could drive up the price of chocolate on shelves around the world, from Brussels to Beijing. Available land for new plantations ran out long ago, and so farmers moved into parks and reserves, up to 60 per cent of which have now been destroyed to plant cocoa.

Cocoa farmer Vincent Karsamba, 42, said he was not aware he was doing anything wrong when he bought 20 hectares inside Mont Peko in 2007, but he is hardly apologetic.

In the meantime, less cocoa production may not be a disaster. “Is it really in Ivory Coast’s interest to have such a dramatic rise in cocoa output year-on-year?” asked Ecobank soft commodities analyst Victoria Crandall.

Rapid growth in production has in recent years outpaced relatively stagnant demand, potentially setting the stage for a drop in world prices that could end up hurting Ivory Coast and its farmers.

Ivory Coast’s short-lived first attempt to clear the forests in 2013, beginning with the Niegre reserve, led to accusations of human rights abuses by security forces. Thousands were left to fend for themselves when bulldozers levelled their homes.

The government has offered to transport around 8,000 park inhabitants who have expressed a desire to return home to neighbouring Burkina Faso. Others have told officials they plan to rejoin family members farming legally elsewhere in Ivory Coast or abandon cocoa for new lines of work.

Ivorian authorities have said they will offer resettlement packages. But the residents of Mont Peko say they still do not know how much help they will get.