Researchers from Ohio State University have discovered that much of the protected land in the country’s national parks and forest reserves in the Ivory Coast have been turned into illegal cocoa farms.
Between 2010 and 2013 the researchers surveyed 23 protected areas, they say in a recently published report, and found that about three-quarters of the land had been turned over to cocoa production.
The Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans, the main ingredient in chocolate, which represents more than one-third of the available supply.
There is a growing worldwide demand for chocolate and Ivory Coast produced a record 1.7 million metric tons of cocoa last year.
Many of the older, legal cocoa plantations in the country have been blighted by disease or are not producing at earlier levels as previously, which has led some growers moving on to create new farms. Migrants from outside the country have moved into Ivory Coast and have turned to farming to survive.
“The world’s demand for chocolate has been very hard on the endangered primates of Ivory Coast,” says W Scott McGraw, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at Ohio State.
McGraw said the original goal of this research was just to do a census of the monkeys in these protected areas.
“But when we started walking through these areas we were just stunned by the scale of illegal cocoa production. It is now the major cause of deforestation in these parks,” he says.
“There are parks in Ivory Coast with no forests and no primates, but a sea of cocoa plants.”
The study (available here) appears in the March 2015 issue of the journal Tropical Conservation Science.
McGraw and his co-authors, working for Ivory Coast research institutions, spent a total of 208 days walking transects through nationally protected areas, most in the central and southern regions of the country.
In each area, they noted the amount of forest that had been cut down or degraded and how much of this was replaced by cocoa or other types of farming.
They also recorded the presence of 16 primate species, including monkeys and chimpanzees.
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They found their results depressing. Of the 23 protected areas, 16 of them had more than 65 per cent of their forests degraded by farms, logging or other human disturbance.
Although a variety of agricultural products were grown illegally in the parks, cocoa constituted 93 per cent.
Unauthorised villages have also sprung up within these parks, with one housing nearly 30,000 people.
“I’ve been doing survey work in these parks for 20 years, and it wasn’t nearly this bad when I started. This is a relatively recent development,” McGraw says.
The study found that the impact on primates in these areas has been dramatic. Overall, 13 of the protected areas had lost their entire primate populations, while another five had lost half.
Two monkeys – the Roloway monkey and the White-naped mangabey – were seen in only two reserves and are critically endangered. Miss Waldron’s red colobus was not seen and has not officially been sighted since 1978. It is probably extinct.
“The Roloway monkey may be the next to go extinct,” McGraw says. “It is not able to live in the degraded habitats that are left in many of these protected areas.”
“There is little, if any, real active protection given to these parks and reserves,” McGraw says. “People have moved in and settled with essentially no resistance, cut down the forest, and planted cocoa. It is incredibly blatant.”
McGraw said that while the results are disappointing, there is still time to halt the disappearance of more primates and other wildlife.
Outside these lands, growers should move toward shade-cocoa farming, which keeps some of the large existing trees, with cocoa plants interspersed among them. This would at least preserve some suitable habitat for monkeys that live in the country, he said.
In addition, there should be efforts to connect the many fragmented forest reserves in the country. “We need to view the protected areas not as individual islands, but as a matrix,” he says.
One promising development is the establishment of community-based bio-monitoring programmes that involve foot patrols conducted by local villagers.
McGraw says his co-authors on this paper established a patrol in the Dassioko Forest Reserve and it has succeeded in reducing illegal activity in the area. Encounter rates with primates has risen in the area as a result.