Cocoa farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast earn less than a dollar a day. And there are almost 2 million; the two countries are the world’s largest cocoa producers, supplying two-thirds of the world’s supply. Cocoa is the most important perennial crop in both places.
However, there are no current, accurate maps of their cocoa plantations. This is a problem as cocoa is known to be the leading cause of deforestation in the region. In addition to decimating biodiversity that may never recover, clearing forests to plant cocoa (or for any other reason) is making it hotter and making storms stronger, both locally in Africa and across the planet.
So a team of European researchers created a deep neural network to collect publicly available satellite images of both countries with georeferenced cocoa plantations, identified by their regular polygons. They then had a team travel around Ivory Coast for three months to visit the farms and verify their results.
They found that in the most densely populated cocoa-growing areas, about 40 percent of the land is planted with the crop and little or no indigenous forest remains. About 5 percent of protected areas in Ghana and nearly 15 percent of protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire have been converted to cocoa plantations – nearly 30 percent of cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire are located in these protected areas.
They calculate that cocoa is directly responsible for nearly 40 percent of deforestation in these protected areas — about 1.5 million hectares of forest gone since 2000. An analysis of plant health shows that the cocoa plants aren’t even doing very well, and the yields are lower than officially reported.
The authors describe the cocoa supply chain as “rather opaque,” which is a euphemism for “totally sketchy.” Deforestation is almost the least of these; drug trafficking and child slavery are also involved.
This work definitely has some uneasy shades of colonialism to it; the European researchers undoubtedly have good intentions to save the forests, and the forests absolutely must be saved, but the African farmers and their families must also eat. As the authors note, “The clearing of natural forests to establish new cocoa plantations provides farmers with temporary fertile land and thus higher yields and more short-term income.” Hopefully, after coming home from a day spent analyzing their surveillance data, the researchers will at least pay a fair price for a responsible bean-to-bar solution rather than underpaying for the mass-produced cocoa they spent their time spend tracking.
Nature Food, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s43016-023-00751-8 (About DOIs).
