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

Biodiversity on a cacao farm also includes towering shade trees, whose leaf litter slowly releases nutrients back into the soil, and offers an attractive habitat to a host of organisms that may be critical in the breakdown and recycling of the nutrients. If the shade trees include legumes, as is the case in many polycultural cacao farms, bacteria that live symbiotically in their roots supply the soil with usable nitrogen. The shade canopy also shields understory plants from the relentless tropical sun, as well as from the physical impact of driving tropical rains, thus reducing soil erosion. The diversity of species that follows from the presence of shade trees undoubtedly helps control certain pests and pathogens as well; taken together, the elements of the system embody the ecological mantra that diversity enhances stability. It is also worth noting that crops grown under a range of shade-tree species support substantially greater local diversity than do those grown under a single such species.

There is an even broader benefit from the massive shade trees that are an integral part of a rustic or polycultural cacao farm. They effectively sequester, or capture, carbon--acting as carbon "sinks" that shunt atmospheric carbon dioxide into fixed sites. That helps alleviate the buildup of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing global climate change.

Historically, cacao itself has been a vagabond crop. Production levels have always been maintained largely by exploiting new forest frontiers worldwide. According to the botanist Francois Ruf of CIKAD, a French organization devoted to agricultural research for developing countries, the cycle begins as new forest is cleared. Seedlings are then planted that can take advantage of the cost-free nutrients in the soil of the newly cleared plot of land. With time, though, the cacao yields decline, until eventually the plot is abandoned. Then the "cocoa cycle" begins once again, on another patch of untouched forest.

In that way, as the worldwide craving for chocolate has grown, the unfettered forces of production have continued taking huge bites out of tropical forests around the globe. With no national guidelines--much less a global, or at least industry-wide, policy--to address the hungry advance of cacao into natural forests, some of the very forests that have served as raw material for cacao production in the past 200 years will soon disappear.

It is true that, in global terms, cacao accounts for a small fraction of forest degradation and clearing at any given moment. Yet the impact of such production methods in particular areas, such as West Africa and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, can be substantial, and where clearing targets forest that harbors endemic species, the threat to biodiversity can be great. Furthermore, if production continues to be concentrated in particular frontier regions, the crop becomes increasingly vulnerable to new fungal diseases. Geographical diversification can help maintain the supply, but eventually a long-term vision is needed.