Scaling Cocoa Agroforestry

Abstract

Cocoa production plays a significant role in global tree cover and biodiversity loss. Amid rising concerns over its role in environmental degradation, agroforestry has emerged as a potential solution to satisfy growing global demand for cocoa in a climate-smart and sustainable way. As a shade tolerant crop, there has been much discussion over the potential ecosystem service benefits that cocoa agroforestry can provide if adopted in degraded production areas. However, not much is known in the academic literature regarding the amount of cocoa agroforestry that currently exists globally. It is also unclear to what extent cocoa agroforestry can be scaled up to and what the potential scale of impact of such an endeavor would be in terms of carbon sequestration. This study aims to address these questions by developing a spatial model that uses georeferenced data on global cocoa production and percentage of tree cover in agricultural areas to estimate the presence and distribution of cocoa agroforestry globally. Using data from the MapSPAM project on the physical area of cocoa production, this study found that approximately 10-21% of global cocoa production areas were covered by cocoa agroforestry systems in 2010. By applying global average findings on cocoa agroforestry benefits from Niether et al. 2020 to global cocoa monoculture areas in 2010, this study found that scaling agroforestry would contribute to sequestering approximately 175 to 199 million tons of carbon. This study also found that scaled agroforestry adoption is likely to reduce cocoa production by about 1.2 to 1.3 million tons per year. Further research examining the carbon benefits and ecosystem services of agroforestry adoption at different regional levels is needed to improve estimates provided in this global assessment. Moreover, challenges in adopting agroforestry are likely to differ across the multiple cocoa producing regions. Further research is thus needed to highlight the environmental constraints and socio-economic bottlenecks that may limit the benefits of agroforestry adoption in each of these regions.