Collaboration aims to achieve climate-smart cocoa production

With cocoa production under impending threat from climate change, stakeholders are increasingly collaborating to secure its future, including sharing scientific research to change the unsustainable methods used by many growers. This was highlighted in a webinar hosted recently by the Forum for Global Challenges.

International Cocoa Organization statistics showed that an estimated 4,73 million tons of cocoa beans were harvested worldwide in the 2019/2020 production year. Leading this were West African countries Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which harvested an estimated 2,11 million tons and 800 000t respectively.

Dr Rebecca Ashley Asare, director of Programs and Research at Ghana’s Nature Conservation Research Centre, said that country had over 800 000 small-scale cocoa farmers. Since the late 1800s, when Ghana began growing cocoa commercially, increasing expansion of production had led to the country losing over 80% of its original tropical forests.

“Due to climate change, some parts of Ghana can no longer grow cocoa. Farmers in the remaining areas of the country need to adapt their existing production methods to become more sustainable and resilient,” Asare said.

She added that a key step towards this was the recent partnership agreement between the Forestry Commission of Ghana (FCG) and the Ghana Cocoa Board (GCB) aimed at preventing further deforestation, and educating and supporting farmers to replant individual indigenous shade trees in various parts of their cocoa fields. This would improve biodiversity in monocropped cocoa plantations, increase carbon sequestration and, depending on the shade tree species, potentially provide cocoa farmers with other products, such as fruit, for home consumption or sale.

Dr Emmanuel Opoku, the GCB’s deputy CEO, said research had found that just 30% shade cover made cocoa trees significantly more productive than if they were growing in direct sunlight.

Saint-Francis Tohlang, Nestlé’s director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs for East and Southern Africa, said Nestlé sourced most of its cocoa from Côte d’Ivoire. The productivity and livelihoods of cocoa farmers there too were being threatened by climate change.

“Our cocoa is grown largely by smallholders. Throughout 2020, we distributed over 669 000 forest and fruit trees globally to support the reforestation of cocoa-growing areas. Our approach is to work with farmer co-operatives that […] provide traceability and records of all their purchases from each individual farmer,” he said.

NESTLÉ The world‘s cocoa bean supply will be in jeopardy if millions of smallholder cocoa farmers are not urgently educated and empowered to implement production methods aimed at adapting to, and helping to reduce, the negative effects of climate change.