OK, so I wanted to just give a short talk and really focus on it's not something that's sexy, let's say,
but something that's really at the heart of what I do and what I really care about is
understanding the social ecology of of cocoa farming in Ghana and social ecology,
meaning natural ecosystems that actually have human beings and people as part of them.
So these cocoa forests, cocoa farms, cocoa agro forest over hundreds of thousands of hectares are real anthropogenic
ecosystems that have been operating for a long time and understanding how do they work?
How do they function and the interplay of the natural science and the social science?
So looking at this system from the perspective of deforestation and climate change.
So I think most people are aware that there's been a great deal of attention in the last year or two to
deforestation and to climate change across the tropics and in Africa in particular the last few weeks.
In fact, with the fires in the Amazon and then talk about fires in central Africa.
These are all many of them happening because of social systems of burning, clearing, burning because you're clearing forests for agriculture.
So these are really topics of our time, challenges of our time.
And so Ghana and cocoa production gives a really nice case study to think about how can we address both these issues in the context of cocoa in Ghana?
But I think more at a continental scale as well. So this is a lovely landscape for anyone who's been in Ghana.
It's the cocoon landscape in the central region.
On your right, you can see the hard boundary of Cocoon National Park and then on your left is a mosaic cocoa oil,
palm food crops, small patches of forest that's, you know, surrounds the entire park.
Ghana's the world's second largest producer of cocoa beans, I think responsible for about 20 percent of global production.
The cocoa tree originated from the Amazon, but has been growing in Ghana for more than a hundred and thirty years now.
There's over 800000 cocoa farmers in Ghana, so it's one of the most.
It's the dominant agricultural system in the southern half of the country in the tropical high forest zone.
And it's been a process of migration from the early nineteen hundreds from the east to this to the West.
And with that, migration has been something of a creeping deforestation or just land use change from forest into different types of cocoa agro forest.
And it's really a crop that across Ghana has been characterised by relatively
low productivity compared to some of the other producer countries in the world,
including Cote d'Ivoire, which is the biggest producer of cocoa.
So cocoa is an entirely a smallholder crop in Ghana, we don't have cocoa plantations.
Part of the reason is that because the land tenure system makes it very difficult to acquire large tracts of land,
but it's also because it's so deeply ingrained in the cultural identity and the cultural practise of southern farmers in Ghana.
So this is just just to say that it's if we I think the 800000 cocoa farmers are responsible,
producing eight hundred and fifty to nine hundred thousand metric tons of cocoa every year,
and it's on the backs of their labour, their effort year in,
year out that Ghana has been able to maintain this top producer position for such a long time.
To think about there are so many people talking about cocoa these days, the types of interventions we need,
I think to really get into it, though you need to fundamentally understand how cocoa is grown.
And like Solomon was talking about those decision processes, what is the social ecosystem of cocoa?
So just as a little introduction here. This is a farm right on the edge of Kakuma National Park, and a few years ago, the farmer came in.
It was just a woody bush fallow. You can see a cyber pine tundra was felled and was rotting for a couple of years.
And so the first step is clearing the forest, clearing the fallow and then coming in and planting food crops.
And so they'll normally plant the planting cassava.
Sometimes there's an early crop of maize and cocoa yam or in the Francophone countries we called taro.
And that becomes really important just for the food, for the household, for a series of years.
And then it also opens up the landscape to then be able to come in.
And so the next step is then actually planting in your cocoa beans.
And so in this in this step,
you can either actually put the beans into the ground or you can plant the seedlings and there's it's better to plant the seedlings.
It's much harder to get access to the hybrid seedlings that that do the best in quotes, right?
And so most farmers don't have good access to those seedlings.
So most farmers end up planting what we call the Atocha method, which is basically the farmers method.
And then, of course, the agronomists tell you you should plant this plant in straight lines and three metre spacing.
But then many farmers actually plant much tighter because it's an effective method of keeping the initial weed growth down.
You get a very early small canopy of cocoa seedlings coming up and the outcompete the weeds.
But this is that first step, and basically, as the cocoa is growing up and establishing itself,
you're harvesting off plantain banana cassava, cocoa yam, which part part of it will go to the market.
Part of it you will eat, and it's a nice integrated intercropping system.
And then eventually, after about five or six years this this farm is quite a bit older.
You'll get to a point where the trees actually start to produce cocoa pods.
So the cocoa beans actually come from these pods as they become yellow or red.
That's when they ripen. There are different species or varieties of trees in the system.
Some are more productive than others, and there's a whole set of barriers to access to the, again, the best varieties.
But farmers will once it gets up to the canopy closing of the cocoa tree.
There's essentially no money, no more tree food crops in that system, and they're harvesting now in Ghana twice a year.
So you have a main crop that's harvested from about October to December, and then you have a light crop that comes in around May, June, July.
And then from there you go into when the pods are ripe, everyone sits down amongst the family.
You have a nice social engagement with some palm wine and you break open the pods and pull out this very sweet.
I think it tastes better than chocolate pulp that's all around the cocoa beans and then it goes into fermentation.
So part of the reason cocoa beans from Ghana have a world market price premium because the
quality the chemical quality actually of the beans is better than in most other countries.
And that's because Ghanaian cocoa farmers, as part of their cultural practise,
ferment beans within these heaps that are covered in banana leaves for six days and it will sit there and ferment.
And when that's done, then they'll put them into bags, bring them to the house, put them out on woven mats and let them dry.
And then after a couple of weeks of drying in the same village or community, you have different purchasing clerks and the first point of sale.
They'll bring their beans for weighing and then it goes down the the value chain.
The market changed from there. So one of the main management practises farmers can work with, or there's a lot of variability, is in shade management.
And even though recent research research is showing that higher levels of shade in cocoa farms actually increases farmer's yield,
which is a real step away from what the old agronomists were saying in the 1980s and 1990s, who are advocating for no shade.
You see a huge variation in in shade and in other trees within the cocoa systems across the whole.
Ghana's cocoa landscape. So these are just two images one from above the canopy.
This is a low to maybe moderate level of shade. Then you see the cocoa at the dark, at the bottom here and then these emergence coming up.
And it looks like it's we're heading into the dry season.
So a terminal here has lost its leaves, which helps keep enough sunlight, but those will come back.
It's a bit of a rough looking system, but it's managed because farmers have selected or allowed those seedlings to regenerate naturally in most cases,
and the trees have actually grown up with the cocoa.
So this is just that's a similar perspective, but from the understory, so you can see a lot of cocoa trees.
And then you see, you know, a series of larger native forest species that have grown with the system in the old days.
They would have been left when before there were chainsaws. But now there's a lot of full clearing and then you allow natural regeneration.
So not being a quick overview of the cocoa production system and sort of some of the key steps along the way.
What is now happening is that since the 2010 2011,
there's been a lot of discussion on climate change in the country and on climate change with the cocoa sector.
And in 2016, after a number of, you know, internal dialogues, discussions, working groups,
a global group of researchers from Siate came out with a really nice study that looked at
all the IPCC projections and looked at current conditions in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire,
saying that there's a significant threat of climate change to cocoa production in West Africa,
such that not many areas will not be able to produce cocoa by 2050.
So those will be your read areas.
And then where we see orange and yellow, we're really going to have to start to work on transforming for resilience or for adaptation.
So basically, the current system is under threat, and we need to start to think about what's the future of how cocoa is farmed to make
sure that we're still getting cocoa beans from West Africa in that climate future.
And then the following. And so you can see, actually, we're already having this experience.
We don't need climate scientists to tell us this.
Farmers know, depending on your soil types, depending on the part of the country that you're in and the microclimate.
There's a lot of farmers are experiencing changes in rainfall pattern in the dry season, which is severely affecting young farmers.
And then also even outside of the cocoa, the food crops, particularly that women are planting,
are also failing, which has a whole series of knock on effects as well.
So this was a particular there was an El Nino event in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen and we
were able to extend our research with a grant from Nurk to continue to follow that event.
And I haven't actually connected yet with Alex to figure to learn about all the findings from that,
but it was really nice to be able to say what happens under normal years. And then we had this major climate event.
And then what were the impacts and how does that start to play into how we conceptualise the way forward?
So the following year, that was 2016.
Then in 2017, the government of Ghana completed a really comprehensive assessment looking at deforestation in the country.
And basically what they came out with was that Ghana, across this high forest zone,
has a three point two percent rate of deforestation every single year and is losing about one hundred thousand hectares of forest annually,
and that this rate has increased dramatically since 2011,
which was an important political year for anybody who knows kind of Ghanaian politics very well.
The main driver was cocoa and other agricultural crops.
And so what has been interesting is that out of this moment of, oh, shoot, we have a crisis,
we have deforestation, we have climate change, it's actually culminated in the government of Ghana,
the Cocoa Board and the Forestry Commission coming together for the first time ever to launch
the Cocoa Forest Redd Plus programme with support from the Forest Carbon Partnership.
It's also committed to a no deforestation supply chain, so basically the entire chocolate industry said, We're with you with this problem.
We want to be part of the solution and we will commit to no longer buying beans that have that are deforestation beans.
The challenge is, how do you do this right? It's easy to make a commitment, but how do you actually achieve your commitments?
And so we've there's been a coming together, and it's basically a concept of rolling out what's termed climate smart cocoa.
There's a lot more detail on this, but the basic aspects are pieces of this are we have to reduce our deforestation.
We have to. Increase our shade in our carbon stocks.
We have to significantly improve farmer's yields and livelihoods through a landscape planning and collaborative governance approach.
And doing that promote biodiversity conservation and ecological resilience.
So the point I want to make here is that if we often turn to the natural scientists to tell us what the problem is,
the Seattle scientists saying you have a climate change problem or to the our modellers saying,
you know, this is what's happening with with forest across Africa.
And we often look to them to frame our solutions.
But the truth is, if we don't understand the social and ecological systems that are operating, operating on the ground,
whatever we put forward as a solution is inevitably going to have, you know, there'll be a disconnect with reality.
And so we really need to understand and take into account these social ecological systems that
are that actually operate and are responsible for what we have today to be able to plan forward.
You know, where do we want to be to be resilient in that 20, 50 or, you know, in the next decade?
So just a few. I know my time is short, but there's an interesting piece of work.
It's not new. I think there's a lot of really brilliant stuff that's been written a long time ago by a man named Walter Firey,
and it basically is arguing that for something to be sustainable,
it needs to be socio culturally adoptable bio physically possible and economically gainful.
And so at the convergence of those three is where you really find the centre of sustainability.
And so examples of what that means for the different spheres.
So if we're looking at changing practises to be more climate smart and we often hear people say you shouldn't be clearing forest,
you shouldn't be clearing trees, you should not be burning.
And yet, if you really want to understand what's the what, what is the perspective of the woman farmer here,
the bio physically possible that it's not good to cut down the forest, not good to cut down,
not good to burn and fully clear is really not very important to her.
What's much more important is I have to grow cassava and I have to grow plantain because this is the food that defines our culture.
The way we talk about tea here in the U.K., everything is, would you like a cup of tea?
And it's our social, it's our social media. And for discussing that is fufu in West Africa.
That is, if you haven't eaten fufu, you haven't eaten for the whole day.
I mean, that is what food is. And so you have to produce these crops because that's what you do.
And that's then the extra money that she will have to take to the markets, et cetera.
So she's not worried about the biophysical. She's centred on the others.
And that's why we see sort of a challenge there.
And we need to understand that before we can start to recommend change, otherwise it won't be it won't be adoptable.
The same thing with maintaining shade trees. There's a lot of fluidity in flux in terms of what is adoptable and what is gainful.
It's very possible to maintain a good bit of shade and cocoa farms.
But the old story, the old extension was remove all your shade to get higher yields,
and that understanding and knowledge is still very prominent amongst farmers.
And how do you change that? In addition, in Ghana, you don't own the trees on your farm,
so there's a very good possibility that at some point a concession off reserve concession will be sold.
Loggers can come in and they will cut down your trees and totally disrupt your farming practises.
So there's not a huge incentive to actually keep trees.
And then in addition, there's issues of fungal diseases and such that if it's too, there's too much moisture, you also lose yield.
So it's a very interesting play here, figuring out how you can achieve sustainability with shade management.
And then my final point is how do we actually get the private sector, the various government agencies and all the know it all?
I say that as I'm one of them NGOs to actually work together because we're all working in the
same places and you'll realise half the times we're all working with the exact same farmers.
Today, the farmer puts on this hat tomorrow, the farmer puts on that hat and we're only getting a very small section of everybody else's out there,
but they're not the easy ones to connect to. So on this front, it's very possible for us all to come and sit down together and work.
But it's very from an institutional cultural perspective.
It's exceedingly uncomfortable. It's really difficult for two private sector cocoa companies to start to work together in a pretty competitive way.
It's difficult for government agencies to start to work together.
And so we all, you know, you sort of see that these aren't our natural inclinations.
And if we want to get to a more sustainable approach, we need to start working on this aspect as well.
And so my final slide here is just to say that we really need to understand the full social ecological system of all
the actors and of the landscape to be able to come up with these solutions for climate change and deforestation.
So thank you. So this is the little Ghana, Oxford.
If you go to a sinful sue and one of the villages, there's an Oxford school there and their motto is knowledge and hard work.
So you're not the only ones.