Direct and indirect cocoa deforestation in the tropical moist forests of Ghana.
Abstract
Across the tropics, cocoa is one of the main drivers of deforestation. In Ghana, the world's second largest cocoa producer, the role of each of the main economic sectors in driving deforestation remains, however, contested - with cocoa, mining, logging, and plantations each blaming the others. Previous work has also suggested that food crops are displaced into forests by cocoa expansion, raising concerns about indirect land use change and impacts on food availability. Here, using satellite-based maps and secondary statistics, we quantify the direct deforestation drivers between 2000 and 2019 in the entire cocoa-growing region of Ghana. Then, we use a land-balance approach to assess the indirect role of the expansion of land uses in food crop deforestation. We find that cocoa is the major direct driver (~57%), followed by food crops and logging (~39% in total). Roughly 30% of the deforestation and degradation linked to food crops could be attributed to their displacement by other land uses - with 15% (9%-17%) due to cocoa expansion into food crops. In cocoa-saturated regions, indirect cocoa deforestation is likely to increase as forests only remain in gazetted areas, where growing food crops is either legal or more tolerated by officials than cocoa. Accounting for its direct and indirect role, cocoa is associated with ~20% of the deforestation in gazetted areas. This research highlights the need to move away from sustainability efforts targeting one single commodity at a time to more transformative approaches that develop a coordinated vision across the food and land system. Such a vision would regulate multiple commodities holistically, address lock-ins, and reconsider the overall goals of land systems in the region (how much land should be dedicated to cocoa, how and for whose benefits).
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2025
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Africa, Ghana
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Open Access This preprint is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, without asking permission.
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Issue publication date: 2025
Submitted: 28 January 2025
Published online: 28 January 2025
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English
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