Côte d'Ivoire's cashew nut boom: A social and ecological transition of the cotton and cocoa systems

Abstract

Côte d'Ivoire's agricultural dynamism continues to surprise commodity markets, especially those of cocoa and rubber. The country has also become the world's leading producer of cashew nuts. How to understand this boom? It is partly driven by markets (stagnation of cotton and cocoa prices versus rising prices of cashew nuts over two periods) but its determining factors are much more complex. The global hypothesis of this study is that the adoption of cashew tree is an adaptation to the loss of forest rent and to climate change, to the increasing cost of chemical inputs for cotton and cocoa, but also responds to land insecurity. An in-depth study was conducted in 2016-2017 in 6 sites chosen along a north-south gradient: Mankono, Konahiri, Bonon, Yamoussoukro, Bayota-Gagnoa and Soubré, with 40 to 100 farms per site, with partial updates in 2018. The survey confirms the hypothesis. Cashew tree, a robust, drought-tolerant tree, for the time being avoids planters relying on chemical inputs and credit, rebuilds a kind of forest canopy, but is also a land marker (it brings an informal land security in the home villages of the migrants but also in their cocoa villages). It becomes the tool of a social and ecological transition. That transition includes significant information, labour and investment flows between the two economic spaces. It is essentially a smallholders' innovation. In the cocoa regions, in its agroforestry version made of cocoa and cashew intercropping, the cashew tree reduces the mortality of cocoa seedlings, and its adoption takes its full dimension of agro-ecological transition. Is family farming alone achieving what the chocolate industry promises on paper: a "zero-deforestation" and sustainable cocoa farming?