1 00:00:00,480 --> 00:00:08,730 OK, so I wanted to just give a short talk and really focus on it's not something that's sexy, let's say, 2 00:00:08,730 --> 00:00:13,770 but something that's really at the heart of what I do and what I really care about is 3 00:00:13,770 --> 00:00:23,850 understanding the social ecology of of cocoa farming in Ghana and social ecology, 4 00:00:23,850 --> 00:00:29,860 meaning natural ecosystems that actually have human beings and people as part of them. 5 00:00:29,860 --> 00:00:39,120 So these cocoa forests, cocoa farms, cocoa agro forest over hundreds of thousands of hectares are real anthropogenic 6 00:00:39,120 --> 00:00:43,620 ecosystems that have been operating for a long time and understanding how do they work? 7 00:00:43,620 --> 00:00:49,740 How do they function and the interplay of the natural science and the social science? 8 00:00:49,740 --> 00:00:55,560 So looking at this system from the perspective of deforestation and climate change. 9 00:00:55,560 --> 00:01:01,950 So I think most people are aware that there's been a great deal of attention in the last year or two to 10 00:01:01,950 --> 00:01:09,210 deforestation and to climate change across the tropics and in Africa in particular the last few weeks. 11 00:01:09,210 --> 00:01:14,730 In fact, with the fires in the Amazon and then talk about fires in central Africa. 12 00:01:14,730 --> 00:01:24,450 These are all many of them happening because of social systems of burning, clearing, burning because you're clearing forests for agriculture. 13 00:01:24,450 --> 00:01:29,910 So these are really topics of our time, challenges of our time. 14 00:01:29,910 --> 00:01:39,810 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? 15 00:01:39,810 --> 00:01:46,740 But I think more at a continental scale as well. So this is a lovely landscape for anyone who's been in Ghana. 16 00:01:46,740 --> 00:01:50,100 It's the cocoon landscape in the central region. 17 00:01:50,100 --> 00:01:57,450 On your right, you can see the hard boundary of Cocoon National Park and then on your left is a mosaic cocoa oil, 18 00:01:57,450 --> 00:02:07,200 palm food crops, small patches of forest that's, you know, surrounds the entire park. 19 00:02:07,200 --> 00:02:15,240 Ghana's the world's second largest producer of cocoa beans, I think responsible for about 20 percent of global production. 20 00:02:15,240 --> 00:02:23,790 The cocoa tree originated from the Amazon, but has been growing in Ghana for more than a hundred and thirty years now. 21 00:02:23,790 --> 00:02:30,330 There's over 800000 cocoa farmers in Ghana, so it's one of the most. 22 00:02:30,330 --> 00:02:36,900 It's the dominant agricultural system in the southern half of the country in the tropical high forest zone. 23 00:02:36,900 --> 00:02:45,030 And it's been a process of migration from the early nineteen hundreds from the east to this to the West. 24 00:02:45,030 --> 00:02:54,660 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. 25 00:02:54,660 --> 00:02:58,560 And it's really a crop that across Ghana has been characterised by relatively 26 00:02:58,560 --> 00:03:02,970 low productivity compared to some of the other producer countries in the world, 27 00:03:02,970 --> 00:03:10,000 including Cote d'Ivoire, which is the biggest producer of cocoa. 28 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:17,200 So cocoa is an entirely a smallholder crop in Ghana, we don't have cocoa plantations. 29 00:03:17,200 --> 00:03:24,400 Part of the reason is that because the land tenure system makes it very difficult to acquire large tracts of land, 30 00:03:24,400 --> 00:03:33,490 but it's also because it's so deeply ingrained in the cultural identity and the cultural practise of southern farmers in Ghana. 31 00:03:33,490 --> 00:03:40,270 So this is just just to say that it's if we I think the 800000 cocoa farmers are responsible, 32 00:03:40,270 --> 00:03:46,180 producing eight hundred and fifty to nine hundred thousand metric tons of cocoa every year, 33 00:03:46,180 --> 00:03:50,050 and it's on the backs of their labour, their effort year in, 34 00:03:50,050 --> 00:03:59,460 year out that Ghana has been able to maintain this top producer position for such a long time. 35 00:03:59,460 --> 00:04:06,360 To think about there are so many people talking about cocoa these days, the types of interventions we need, 36 00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:12,270 I think to really get into it, though you need to fundamentally understand how cocoa is grown. 37 00:04:12,270 --> 00:04:20,220 And like Solomon was talking about those decision processes, what is the social ecosystem of cocoa? 38 00:04:20,220 --> 00:04:28,230 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. 39 00:04:28,230 --> 00:04:36,090 It was just a woody bush fallow. You can see a cyber pine tundra was felled and was rotting for a couple of years. 40 00:04:36,090 --> 00:04:42,720 And so the first step is clearing the forest, clearing the fallow and then coming in and planting food crops. 41 00:04:42,720 --> 00:04:45,960 And so they'll normally plant the planting cassava. 42 00:04:45,960 --> 00:04:53,220 Sometimes there's an early crop of maize and cocoa yam or in the Francophone countries we called taro. 43 00:04:53,220 --> 00:05:00,900 And that becomes really important just for the food, for the household, for a series of years. 44 00:05:00,900 --> 00:05:04,890 And then it also opens up the landscape to then be able to come in. 45 00:05:04,890 --> 00:05:10,050 And so the next step is then actually planting in your cocoa beans. 46 00:05:10,050 --> 00:05:11,730 And so in this in this step, 47 00:05:11,730 --> 00:05:21,600 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. 48 00:05:21,600 --> 00:05:28,170 It's much harder to get access to the hybrid seedlings that that do the best in quotes, right? 49 00:05:28,170 --> 00:05:31,500 And so most farmers don't have good access to those seedlings. 50 00:05:31,500 --> 00:05:37,020 So most farmers end up planting what we call the Atocha method, which is basically the farmers method. 51 00:05:37,020 --> 00:05:43,500 And then, of course, the agronomists tell you you should plant this plant in straight lines and three metre spacing. 52 00:05:43,500 --> 00:05:50,880 But then many farmers actually plant much tighter because it's an effective method of keeping the initial weed growth down. 53 00:05:50,880 --> 00:05:56,760 You get a very early small canopy of cocoa seedlings coming up and the outcompete the weeds. 54 00:05:56,760 --> 00:06:03,030 But this is that first step, and basically, as the cocoa is growing up and establishing itself, 55 00:06:03,030 --> 00:06:09,450 you're harvesting off plantain banana cassava, cocoa yam, which part part of it will go to the market. 56 00:06:09,450 --> 00:06:16,740 Part of it you will eat, and it's a nice integrated intercropping system. 57 00:06:16,740 --> 00:06:21,390 And then eventually, after about five or six years this this farm is quite a bit older. 58 00:06:21,390 --> 00:06:25,590 You'll get to a point where the trees actually start to produce cocoa pods. 59 00:06:25,590 --> 00:06:30,270 So the cocoa beans actually come from these pods as they become yellow or red. 60 00:06:30,270 --> 00:06:36,960 That's when they ripen. There are different species or varieties of trees in the system. 61 00:06:36,960 --> 00:06:45,060 Some are more productive than others, and there's a whole set of barriers to access to the, again, the best varieties. 62 00:06:45,060 --> 00:06:49,980 But farmers will once it gets up to the canopy closing of the cocoa tree. 63 00:06:49,980 --> 00:06:59,250 There's essentially no money, no more tree food crops in that system, and they're harvesting now in Ghana twice a year. 64 00:06:59,250 --> 00:07:10,290 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. 65 00:07:10,290 --> 00:07:15,990 And then from there you go into when the pods are ripe, everyone sits down amongst the family. 66 00:07:15,990 --> 00:07:24,090 You have a nice social engagement with some palm wine and you break open the pods and pull out this very sweet. 67 00:07:24,090 --> 00:07:30,840 I think it tastes better than chocolate pulp that's all around the cocoa beans and then it goes into fermentation. 68 00:07:30,840 --> 00:07:37,230 So part of the reason cocoa beans from Ghana have a world market price premium because the 69 00:07:37,230 --> 00:07:42,060 quality the chemical quality actually of the beans is better than in most other countries. 70 00:07:42,060 --> 00:07:47,190 And that's because Ghanaian cocoa farmers, as part of their cultural practise, 71 00:07:47,190 --> 00:07:54,000 ferment beans within these heaps that are covered in banana leaves for six days and it will sit there and ferment. 72 00:07:54,000 --> 00:08:02,730 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. 73 00:08:02,730 --> 00:08:10,290 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. 74 00:08:10,290 --> 00:08:15,270 They'll bring their beans for weighing and then it goes down the the value chain. 75 00:08:15,270 --> 00:08:25,590 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. 76 00:08:25,590 --> 00:08:33,990 And even though recent research research is showing that higher levels of shade in cocoa farms actually increases farmer's yield, 77 00:08:33,990 --> 00:08:43,050 which is a real step away from what the old agronomists were saying in the 1980s and 1990s, who are advocating for no shade. 78 00:08:43,050 --> 00:08:49,920 You see a huge variation in in shade and in other trees within the cocoa systems across the whole. 79 00:08:49,920 --> 00:08:55,350 Ghana's cocoa landscape. So these are just two images one from above the canopy. 80 00:08:55,350 --> 00:09:03,830 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. 81 00:09:03,830 --> 00:09:06,560 And it looks like it's we're heading into the dry season. 82 00:09:06,560 --> 00:09:14,000 So a terminal here has lost its leaves, which helps keep enough sunlight, but those will come back. 83 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:22,130 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, 84 00:09:22,130 --> 00:09:25,070 and the trees have actually grown up with the cocoa. 85 00:09:25,070 --> 00:09:31,790 So this is just that's a similar perspective, but from the understory, so you can see a lot of cocoa trees. 86 00:09:31,790 --> 00:09:39,950 And then you see, you know, a series of larger native forest species that have grown with the system in the old days. 87 00:09:39,950 --> 00:09:49,040 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. 88 00:09:49,040 --> 00:09:58,220 So not being a quick overview of the cocoa production system and sort of some of the key steps along the way. 89 00:09:58,220 --> 00:10:03,770 What is now happening is that since the 2010 2011, 90 00:10:03,770 --> 00:10:09,950 there's been a lot of discussion on climate change in the country and on climate change with the cocoa sector. 91 00:10:09,950 --> 00:10:17,420 And in 2016, after a number of, you know, internal dialogues, discussions, working groups, 92 00:10:17,420 --> 00:10:22,970 a global group of researchers from Siate came out with a really nice study that looked at 93 00:10:22,970 --> 00:10:29,240 all the IPCC projections and looked at current conditions in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, 94 00:10:29,240 --> 00:10:36,290 saying that there's a significant threat of climate change to cocoa production in West Africa, 95 00:10:36,290 --> 00:10:41,780 such that not many areas will not be able to produce cocoa by 2050. 96 00:10:41,780 --> 00:10:43,880 So those will be your read areas. 97 00:10:43,880 --> 00:10:53,000 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. 98 00:10:53,000 --> 00:11:01,160 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 99 00:11:01,160 --> 00:11:08,600 sure that we're still getting cocoa beans from West Africa in that climate future. 100 00:11:08,600 --> 00:11:13,910 And then the following. And so you can see, actually, we're already having this experience. 101 00:11:13,910 --> 00:11:16,130 We don't need climate scientists to tell us this. 102 00:11:16,130 --> 00:11:23,510 Farmers know, depending on your soil types, depending on the part of the country that you're in and the microclimate. 103 00:11:23,510 --> 00:11:32,900 There's a lot of farmers are experiencing changes in rainfall pattern in the dry season, which is severely affecting young farmers. 104 00:11:32,900 --> 00:11:38,720 And then also even outside of the cocoa, the food crops, particularly that women are planting, 105 00:11:38,720 --> 00:11:43,610 are also failing, which has a whole series of knock on effects as well. 106 00:11:43,610 --> 00:11:50,330 So this was a particular there was an El Nino event in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen and we 107 00:11:50,330 --> 00:11:55,160 were able to extend our research with a grant from Nurk to continue to follow that event. 108 00:11:55,160 --> 00:12:01,610 And I haven't actually connected yet with Alex to figure to learn about all the findings from that, 109 00:12:01,610 --> 00:12:07,070 but it was really nice to be able to say what happens under normal years. And then we had this major climate event. 110 00:12:07,070 --> 00:12:14,090 And then what were the impacts and how does that start to play into how we conceptualise the way forward? 111 00:12:14,090 --> 00:12:16,430 So the following year, that was 2016. 112 00:12:16,430 --> 00:12:26,030 Then in 2017, the government of Ghana completed a really comprehensive assessment looking at deforestation in the country. 113 00:12:26,030 --> 00:12:31,340 And basically what they came out with was that Ghana, across this high forest zone, 114 00:12:31,340 --> 00:12:41,150 has a three point two percent rate of deforestation every single year and is losing about one hundred thousand hectares of forest annually, 115 00:12:41,150 --> 00:12:46,400 and that this rate has increased dramatically since 2011, 116 00:12:46,400 --> 00:12:51,410 which was an important political year for anybody who knows kind of Ghanaian politics very well. 117 00:12:51,410 --> 00:12:57,620 The main driver was cocoa and other agricultural crops. 118 00:12:57,620 --> 00:13:04,490 And so what has been interesting is that out of this moment of, oh, shoot, we have a crisis, 119 00:13:04,490 --> 00:13:11,150 we have deforestation, we have climate change, it's actually culminated in the government of Ghana, 120 00:13:11,150 --> 00:13:16,190 the Cocoa Board and the Forestry Commission coming together for the first time ever to launch 121 00:13:16,190 --> 00:13:20,270 the Cocoa Forest Redd Plus programme with support from the Forest Carbon Partnership. 122 00:13:20,270 --> 00:13:27,680 It's also committed to a no deforestation supply chain, so basically the entire chocolate industry said, We're with you with this problem. 123 00:13:27,680 --> 00:13:34,220 We want to be part of the solution and we will commit to no longer buying beans that have that are deforestation beans. 124 00:13:34,220 --> 00:13:41,090 The challenge is, how do you do this right? It's easy to make a commitment, but how do you actually achieve your commitments? 125 00:13:41,090 --> 00:13:48,830 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. 126 00:13:48,830 --> 00:13:56,900 There's a lot more detail on this, but the basic aspects are pieces of this are we have to reduce our deforestation. 127 00:13:56,900 --> 00:13:59,940 We have to. Increase our shade in our carbon stocks. 128 00:13:59,940 --> 00:14:07,380 We have to significantly improve farmer's yields and livelihoods through a landscape planning and collaborative governance approach. 129 00:14:07,380 --> 00:14:12,660 And doing that promote biodiversity conservation and ecological resilience. 130 00:14:12,660 --> 00:14:21,420 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, 131 00:14:21,420 --> 00:14:27,600 the Seattle scientists saying you have a climate change problem or to the our modellers saying, 132 00:14:27,600 --> 00:14:31,950 you know, this is what's happening with with forest across Africa. 133 00:14:31,950 --> 00:14:35,010 And we often look to them to frame our solutions. 134 00:14:35,010 --> 00:14:41,550 But the truth is, if we don't understand the social and ecological systems that are operating, operating on the ground, 135 00:14:41,550 --> 00:14:48,900 whatever we put forward as a solution is inevitably going to have, you know, there'll be a disconnect with reality. 136 00:14:48,900 --> 00:14:55,800 And so we really need to understand and take into account these social ecological systems that 137 00:14:55,800 --> 00:15:02,490 are that actually operate and are responsible for what we have today to be able to plan forward. 138 00:15:02,490 --> 00:15:09,030 You know, where do we want to be to be resilient in that 20, 50 or, you know, in the next decade? 139 00:15:09,030 --> 00:15:14,550 So just a few. I know my time is short, but there's an interesting piece of work. 140 00:15:14,550 --> 00:15:21,330 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, 141 00:15:21,330 --> 00:15:25,410 and it basically is arguing that for something to be sustainable, 142 00:15:25,410 --> 00:15:32,170 it needs to be socio culturally adoptable bio physically possible and economically gainful. 143 00:15:32,170 --> 00:15:37,540 And so at the convergence of those three is where you really find the centre of sustainability. 144 00:15:37,540 --> 00:15:44,800 And so examples of what that means for the different spheres. 145 00:15:44,800 --> 00:15:52,030 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, 146 00:15:52,030 --> 00:15:55,030 you shouldn't be clearing trees, you should not be burning. 147 00:15:55,030 --> 00:16:02,650 And yet, if you really want to understand what's the what, what is the perspective of the woman farmer here, 148 00:16:02,650 --> 00:16:07,540 the bio physically possible that it's not good to cut down the forest, not good to cut down, 149 00:16:07,540 --> 00:16:13,420 not good to burn and fully clear is really not very important to her. 150 00:16:13,420 --> 00:16:21,700 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. 151 00:16:21,700 --> 00:16:27,130 The way we talk about tea here in the U.K., everything is, would you like a cup of tea? 152 00:16:27,130 --> 00:16:32,200 And it's our social, it's our social media. And for discussing that is fufu in West Africa. 153 00:16:32,200 --> 00:16:36,610 That is, if you haven't eaten fufu, you haven't eaten for the whole day. 154 00:16:36,610 --> 00:16:41,920 I mean, that is what food is. And so you have to produce these crops because that's what you do. 155 00:16:41,920 --> 00:16:46,870 And that's then the extra money that she will have to take to the markets, et cetera. 156 00:16:46,870 --> 00:16:51,970 So she's not worried about the biophysical. She's centred on the others. 157 00:16:51,970 --> 00:16:54,250 And that's why we see sort of a challenge there. 158 00:16:54,250 --> 00:17:01,210 And we need to understand that before we can start to recommend change, otherwise it won't be it won't be adoptable. 159 00:17:01,210 --> 00:17:10,570 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. 160 00:17:10,570 --> 00:17:15,730 It's very possible to maintain a good bit of shade and cocoa farms. 161 00:17:15,730 --> 00:17:21,400 But the old story, the old extension was remove all your shade to get higher yields, 162 00:17:21,400 --> 00:17:26,320 and that understanding and knowledge is still very prominent amongst farmers. 163 00:17:26,320 --> 00:17:31,750 And how do you change that? In addition, in Ghana, you don't own the trees on your farm, 164 00:17:31,750 --> 00:17:37,900 so there's a very good possibility that at some point a concession off reserve concession will be sold. 165 00:17:37,900 --> 00:17:43,450 Loggers can come in and they will cut down your trees and totally disrupt your farming practises. 166 00:17:43,450 --> 00:17:46,270 So there's not a huge incentive to actually keep trees. 167 00:17:46,270 --> 00:17:54,030 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. 168 00:17:54,030 --> 00:18:01,900 So it's a very interesting play here, figuring out how you can achieve sustainability with shade management. 169 00:18:01,900 --> 00:18:09,940 And then my final point is how do we actually get the private sector, the various government agencies and all the know it all? 170 00:18:09,940 --> 00:18:15,220 I say that as I'm one of them NGOs to actually work together because we're all working in the 171 00:18:15,220 --> 00:18:20,200 same places and you'll realise half the times we're all working with the exact same farmers. 172 00:18:20,200 --> 00:18:27,430 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, 173 00:18:27,430 --> 00:18:38,140 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. 174 00:18:38,140 --> 00:18:42,790 But it's very from an institutional cultural perspective. 175 00:18:42,790 --> 00:18:51,790 It's exceedingly uncomfortable. It's really difficult for two private sector cocoa companies to start to work together in a pretty competitive way. 176 00:18:51,790 --> 00:18:56,320 It's difficult for government agencies to start to work together. 177 00:18:56,320 --> 00:19:01,150 And so we all, you know, you sort of see that these aren't our natural inclinations. 178 00:19:01,150 --> 00:19:08,500 And if we want to get to a more sustainable approach, we need to start working on this aspect as well. 179 00:19:08,500 --> 00:19:17,050 And so my final slide here is just to say that we really need to understand the full social ecological system of all 180 00:19:17,050 --> 00:19:24,580 the actors and of the landscape to be able to come up with these solutions for climate change and deforestation. 181 00:19:24,580 --> 00:19:33,160 So thank you. So this is the little Ghana, Oxford. 182 00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:42,250 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. 183 00:19:42,250 --> 00:19:45,564 So you're not the only ones.