Cocoa Establishment and Shade Management in Ghana’s Ashanti Region: Understanding the Main Factors Driving Farmer’s Decision Processes and Practices
Rebecca Ashley Asare
2009

Ghana is the world’s second largest producer of cocoa beans and cocoa agroforests dominate the country’s humid forest landscape. For more than a century, the cocoa industry has supported smallholder livelihoods and helped to fuel the national economy. In recent years, cocoa agroforestry systems have received considerable attention for their contributions to biodiversity conservation. In West Africa, this research has primarily focused on the diversity of forest tree species, and the economic and social value of cocoa agroforests. However, little research has focused on identifying and understanding the social factors and processes that have not only created, but are responsible for maintaining these systems. Therefore, this research sought to identify and understand the main factors from biophysical, cultural, social, and economic realms driving farmer’s decision processes and practices as they establish and manage young cocoa farms in southern districts of the Ashanti Region. Specifically, this entailed answering five key research questions, which are summarized as: 1) what are farmer’s current practices; 2) what are the main factors driving their decision making; 3) how do incentives and disincentives influence farmer’s selection of timber trees; 4) how do information sources and social variables affect knowledge about shade management; and 5) how does knowledge affect decision making?

The research adopted a social-centric focus, but it integrated theories and methods from the disciplines of social ecology, agroforestry and forest ecology. Overall, the research demonstrates that within the study area, cocoa agroforestry represents a stable resource system that is oriented towards socially bound gainfulness. In creating new farms, farmers intensively clear the land and uniformly plant food crops as initial shade for cocoa seedlings. However, once food crops are harvested, farmers overwhelmingly choose shaded cocoa systems, and rely upon natural processes of forest succession to bring the majority of shade trees into their farms, which are then managed according to two slightly divergent strategies.
Every farming practice was influenced by a combination of inter-related economic, ethnographic and environmental variables; no single factor influenced farming decisions in isolation. The main factors driving farmer’s decision processes include overcoming labor, capital, and socio-institutional constraint, finding the culturally appropriate and ecologically viable balance between sunlight and shade, integrating secondary products into the system, and subconsciously conforming to social patterns at the village or district scale. In selecting timber species, access to wood was the most important incentive as it transcended all of the disincentives associated with logging by private companies in cocoa farms. However, this pattern of decision making appears to rest upon the existence of de facto and not de jure user rights to on-farm timber. Finally, all of the farmers in the study relied upon local information sources; however a positive relationship emerged between higher levels of education, and extra-local sources like experts and the media. The content of farmer knowledge was correlated to villages, as well as information sources, age, and the nature of the information. Yet, knowledge rarely translated directly into practice as there was a very high degree of adaptation. Likewise, no social order variables demonstrated a link to farmer’s adoption decisions, although a farmer’s village did influence the degree to which farmers adapted.