Climate-Smart Cocoa in Ghana: How Ecological Modernisation Discourse Risks Side-Lining Cocoa Smallholders

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to transform and reorient farming systems to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, boost adaptive capacity, and improve productivity while supporting incomes and, ostensibly, food security. In Ghana-the world's second biggest cocoa producer-the cocoa sector is challenged by increasing global cocoa demand, climate change impacts, as well as mounting consumer pressure over cocoa's deforestation. Climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to address these challenges as well as to improve smallholder incomes. As with CSA more widely, there are concerns that CSC discourses will override the interests of cocoa smallholders, and lead to inequitable outcomes. To better understand if and how the implementation of CSC in Ghana can meet its lofty ambitions, we examine (1) the dominant CSC discourses as perceived by stakeholders, and their reflection in policy and practice, and (2) subsequent implications for cocoa smallholders through an equity lens. Through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with key stakeholders in Ghana's cocoa sector, we find overwhelming consensus for an ecological modernisation discourse with the promise of a "triple win" narrative that simultaneously stops deforestation, supports climate mitigation and adaptation, and increases smallholder livelihoods. Moreover, we find that implementing CSC on the ground has generally converged around "sustainable intensification" and private-sectorled partnerships that aspire to generate a "win-win" for environment and productivity objectives, but potentially at the expense of delivering equitable outcomes that serve smallholders' interests. We find that the success of CSC and the overly-simplistic sustainable intensification narrative is constrained by the lack of clear tree tenure rights, complexities around optimal shade trees levels, potential rebound effects regarding deforestation, and the risks of agrochemical-dependence. More positively, local governance mechanisms such as Ghana's Community Resource Management Area Nasser et al. Climate-Smart Cocoa Discourses in Ghana Mechanisms (CREMAs) may give cocoa smallholders a stronger voice to shape policy. However, we caution that the discursive power of dominant private sector actors may risk side-lining equity which could prove detrimental to the long-term wellbeing of Ghana's ∼800,000 cocoa smallholders.

Plotting the coloniality of conservation

“…Multinational chocolate corporations have responded with 'climate-smart' cocoa (CSC) and 'zero-deforestation' cocoa schemes (Ingram et al, 2018;Krauss, 2018;Kroeger et al, 2017b). However, the corporate focus on the biophysical target of zero deforestation risks side-lining the livelihoods and concerns of already marginalized cocoa smallholders, and compounding their existing vulnerabilities (Nasser et al, 2020;Newell and Taylor, 2018). These conservation responses can therefore be seen as reproducing an historical international division of labor wherein non-European livelihoods become expendable relative to capital accumulation and Western interests.…”

Long-Term Patterns of Change in the Commercialisation of Cocoa in Ghana: Forest Frontiers and Technological Transformation

“…They also promote tree planting of shade trees that have economic significance and can provide farmers with an income. However, they continue to work within a framework of intensification of input use, rather than promoting a more diversified agroecosystem that can reduce reliance on agrochemicals and dependence on monocultures (Schroth and Harvey, 2007;Gockowski and Sonwa, 2011;Nasser et al, 2020). This focuses on intensifying production and preserving trees without addressing the profound issues of diseases and pests that result in increasing use of agrochemicals that have negative impacts on the forest fauna and farmers capital (Clough, Faust and Tscharntke, 2009;Asigbaase et al, 2019).…”

“…This resulted in the rapid offtake of timber in farming areas during the 1990s, which contributed about 80 per cent of timber exports (Amanor, 1999). As a result of damage rendered to cocoa plantations by timber concessionaires, farmers became reluctant to preserve timber trees within their farms, leading to the rapid reduction of shade trees on farms (Amanor, 2005;Marfo et al, 2012;Dawoe et al, 2016;Nasser et al, 2020). Present initiatives enable farmers to register areas in which they have planted trees, but do not give them rights to sell trees independently or to process them into timber.…”

“…The moral discourses on intensifying production to halt deforestation and expansion into new areas, and the needs to introduce surveillance over farm production also add to the pressures on smallholders. Those least likely to benefit from these arrangements include the large numbers of cocoa planters who acquire land on sharecrop arrangements (Nasser et al, 2020).…”

Integrated-Smart Agriculture: Contexts and Assumptions for a Broader Concept

“…The current impacts in the farming systems are implications of the global warming and come from socioeconomic changes, for what are needed integrated approaches [164]. Viticulture and the copper toxicity is another concern [165], as well as the cotton production [166], oil palm plantations [167], cocoa [168], and coffee production [169].…”