Forest- and Climate-Smart Cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana

Farmers’ choice for indigenous practices and implications for climate-smart agriculture in northern Ghana

“…Inadequate access to credit and (high) cost of farm inputs and services have been reported as significant barriers to the use of sustainable agricultural practices among smallholder farmers in SSA [ 54 , 61 , 81 ]. The findings also corroborate [ 82 ] who observed that lack of access to and availability of improved seeds and inputs have partly been responsible for low adoption of climate-smart practices in Ghana.…”

Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis

“…New subjectivities, behaviours, and discursive norms about the environment (specifically about forests and shade trees) emerged in this era, but only among smallholders participating voluntarily in certification or sustainable cocoa schemes. However, as is it estimated that the two countries combined lost a further 2.3 million ha of forest to cocoa cultivation alone between 1998 and 2007 (Gockowski and Sonwa, 2011;Kroeger et al, 2017), the global chocolate industry currently seeks a landscapewide initiative enabling all Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa farmers to become environmental subjects and forest protectors. It is to this 'climate-smart cocoa' that we now turn.…”

The Financialization of Coffee, Cocoa and Cotton Value Chains: The Role of Physical Actors

“…The production and export of coffee, cocoa and cotton represent an essential source of revenue for many countries and millions of smallholders in the global South. It is estimated that 80 per cent of coffee is produced by 25 million smallholders (Fairtrade International, 2021), while cocoa is grown by around 5 million smallholder households, particularly in West Africa (Kroeger et al., 2017), and smallholders represent 99 per cent of all cotton farmers and 70 per cent of total cotton production (IDH, 2021). In 2019, 25 per cent of all developing countries listed one or more of these commodities among their 10 most important export goods.…”