finds that some of these harms may be worse than previously thought. Official figures underestimate the number of cocoa farms in West Africa, and so the effect that the industry has on deforestation.
Nikolai Kalischek of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and a group of colleagues set out to map deforestation driven by cocoa farming across Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce two-thirds of the world’s cocoa. To generate their map, they combined data on the known locations of certain cocoa plantations with high-resolution satellite imagery. Using this data they trained a computer model to predict the likelihood that each location on the map is home to a cocoa farm.
It showed that cocoa farms make up 13.8% of the land area of Ivory Coast, and 11.4% of Ghana . For Ivory Coast these numbers roughly match figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, but for Ghana estimates using the new method are nearly 70% higher than previously thought. The map-makers also found that 30% of farms in Ivory Coast and 7% in Ghana were planted on what should be protected forest. The soils on recently cleared forest are especially fertile , which gives farmers high yields in the short run. In the Tano Ehuro and Manzan forest reserves in Ghana, for example, illegal cocoa farming is taking place on half to three-quarters of their areas.
Production of cocoa exploded in the 1900s, driven by choco-fever in Europe and America, and has continued to grow. In theory governments and corporations have been trying to stop cocoa-driven deforestation for years, both by giving farmers incentives not to chop down trees and by enforcing stricter regulations. Unfortunately, it seems they have not yet stamped out the bitter practice.