The chocolate tree: growing cacao in the forest can provide a living to small farmers and a habitat to diverse creatures

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Robert A. Rice, Russell Greenberg

Traditional rustic and polycultural cacao systems seem well suited to cope with such risks. Part of their success comes from diversification: the multi-layered forest yields not only cacao beans but also a cornucopia of other products. Farmers can harvest avocados, bananas, breadfruits, mangoes, and oranges, as well as medicinal plants, rubber, and timber. Harvesting wood from a traditional cacao farm has the added benefit of protecting other extant forests from the ax. And when cacao bean prices are low, a farm's noncacao products can still supplement the household diet and generate cash at nearby markets. Finally, polycultural cacao farms that are abandoned when world cacao prices fall or disease attacks the trees may devolve into patches of secondary forest, a habitat that remains conducive to preserving biodiversity.

Today some 17 million acres worldwide are planted in cacao, an increase of 60 percent since the early 1960s--when the North American dessert choice was far more likely to be cherry pie a la mode than chocolate mousse. Production of cacao beans approached three million metric tons in 2002. On a global scale, about 90 percent of all cacao farmers are "small"--defined as holding less than twenty-five acres. In some nations, such as Ghana and Cameroon, "small" almost certainly refers to a farm of less than half that area. Plantation farming was particularly popular in Malaysia, where in the early 1990s total cacao acreage soared to 750,000. But large-scale farming proved unsuccessful, and so most of the country's 125,000 acres of cacao today are small-scale farms.

In 1996 ornithologists announced the discovery of a new species of Neotropical ovenbird, the pink-legged graveteiro (Acrobatornis fonsecai), within the rustic cacao farms of the state of Bahia, Brazil. An endangered monkey, the golden-headed lion tamarin, had already been spotted in the same habitat. Those sightings were turning points for conservation biologists. After decades of focusing on pristine habitats, the biologists began to pay increasing attention to agricultural settings. Part of the shift came from their realization that, in many areas, agroforests and forest fragments are all that remain of the original, vast forestlands. Cacao farms quickly came to be regarded as preservers of biodiversity.

Surveys of the flora and fauna of rustic cacao farms in West Africa have been conducted since the 1950s, but the recent sightings of rare birds have brought new energy to the fieldwork. We and our colleagues at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, as well as other groups working in Brazil, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and West Africa, have consistently found greater diversity of species in the agroforests than we can document on other kinds of agricultural lands. Agroforests still harbor such forest species as bats, canopy birds, and migratory birds.

Compared with natural forest, of course, even agroforest lands are generally depauperate. The main casualties are tree species characteristic of old-growth forests. Such trees appear doomed to vanish because regeneration is unlikely wherever the understory has been highly altered. With their disappearance comes the disappearance of the coevolved fauna: large mammals and understory birds native to pristine forests are absent in the agroforest. For that reason, the rustic cacao farm is probably not an eco logically stable system. But the findings of the biodiversity surveys suggest that even some of the small-scale polycultural cacao farms offer shelter to many otherwise doomed forest organisms. Perhaps the best hope for the future is a polycultural system developed out of a combination of traditional practices and modern research, planted with shade trees that are valuable to wildlife as well as people.