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If you’re a chocoholic, you may have noticed that the price of cocoa recently went through the roof. Cocoa prices on the world market—which averaged around $2,500 over the past decade—reached $10,000 per ton. It’s the highest in history. Experts think it’s likely to remain above $5,000/ton for the next 16 months at least.
You may have also read that global warming is to blame for recent sky-high prices, with wild weather anomalies hitting cocoa farms hard.
What’s received less attention is the root cause of the problem.
While the weather anomalies are worsened by global warming, what’s actually causing them is largely local deforestation—more specifically, the clearing of forests to make way for cocoa plantations.
Cocoa is a “cannibal commodity.” Its production has killed the forests that have helped it thrive. Now, standing in the wreckage of once-spectacular tropical jungles, cocoa farms struggle.
While working for the NGO Mighty Earth, I broke open a shocking scandal: the Ivory Coast—the world’s top cocoa-producing country—lost 94% of its forests since 1990. The Ivory Coast is not a rinky-dink footnote for the chocolate industry: it’s the top global cocoa producing country in the world. In Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa producer, 80% to 90% of forests were destroyed in that same time. Roughly a third of the deforestation in both countries was for cocoa.
Forests are essentially rain machines: kill forests, and the rains go haywire. Without forests, you lose the rainfall they make possible. You lose forests’ ability to buffer agricultural systems like cocoa from droughts by keeping soils moist. Air moisture that forests generate also vanishes.
Additionally, you lose forests’ air-conditioning effect, which keeps air cool and moist, thereby protecting nearby agricultural systems (like cocoa) from heat domes. Have you ever walked into a forest and felt a delicious moist coolness caressing your skin? Imagine losing that at an epic scale. Imagine losing 94% of a country’s forests.
Forests don’t only save us when it’s hot or dry. They also help when it’s overly wet. Acting like giant sponges, they suck up vast quantities of water, thus protecting agricultural systems like cocoa from storms, floods, or unseasonably intense rainy seasons.
View all of Mongabay’s agroforestry coverage here.
Largely driven by cocoa, deforestation in West Africa ravaged rain cycles, and we now reap the whirlwind with crop failures. The result is a shrinking cocoa supply, which triggered panic and speculation including by “non-commercial traders” in futures markets, and then skyrocketing prices. A 10% cocoa shortage resulted in a multiplication of world cocoa prices by a factor of more than four (+300%) since speculation is a common factor in commodity markets in periods where prices shoot up.
But the bottom line is that chocolate costs more now because for decades, the cocoa industry obliterated West African forests. Unless we change course, shortages will only get worse, and chocolate prices will only increase.
The good news is that chocolate companies and producer governments still can address the problem. To do so, they must halt all future cocoa-driven deforestation—an especially critical task now that high prices risk triggering a production boom, with impoverished farmers rushing to benefit from high prices by replacing the last remaining forests with cocoa.
To contain impacts of past deforestation and promote predictability in production, they must transform all existing monoculture cocoa to shade-grown or agroforestry cocoa. Agroforestry systems weave trees in and around cocoa, instead of mono-cropping where farms consist of a sea of unbroken cocoa. Although agroforestry cocoa will never stabilize rainfall as well as forests, it functions substantially better than a monoculture.
If that sounds like a pie-in-the-sky-tree-hugger fantasy to you, think again. Almost every major chocolate company has begun moving towards agroforestry pilot projects because of recent civil society campaigns. Experts at the Smithsonian, who are hardly frothing-at-the-mouth activists, created a mammoth e-library of all peer-reviewed science on agroforestry cocoa. From that library and from industry pilots, we know how to shift from mono-cropping to agroforestry.
What industry lacks so far is the will to shift, which can help save our chocolate and our planet. It’s the only one we’ve got! (Sorry Elon.)
Etelle Higonnet previously served as Senior Advisor at the National Wildlife Federation with a focus on curbing deforestation, and before that as campaign director at Mighty Earth, focusing on advocacy for zero deforestation with an emphasis on cocoa, palm oil, rubber, cattle, and soy industries.
Banner image: Chocolate pastries. Image by Chris Hardy via Unsplash.
See related:
To save chocolate’s future, ‘start now and go big’ on agroforestry
Can agroforestry chocolate help save the world’s most endangered rainforest?
