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Biodiversity and smallholder cocoa production systems in West Africa

The Sustainable Tree Crops Program (STCP) Working Paper Series Issue 6, January (2008)

Tropical rainforests are estimated to account for more than half of the plant and animal species on earth with some estimates ranging up to 90 percent, although they only cover about seven percent of global land area. Rapid population growth in the 20th century, poverty and unregulated access to tropical forest resources are threatening globally critical tropical forest biomes that were until recent times protected by their inaccessibility. Worldwide, the coverage of closed canopy moist tropical rainforests has declined rapidly in recent years to roughly 20 million km2 at the start of the 21st century. The destruction of approximately half of global tropical rainforest habitat in the last century has raised alarms from numerous quarters. [...] The focus of our analysis is cocoa production and deforestation in the Guinean moist forests of West Africa. Identified more than 30 years ago as a global priority ecosystem for biodiversity conservation (Myers, et al., 1988) these forests are home to more than a quarter of Africa’s mammals, including more than 20 species of primates. However, rapid land-use change is threatening to consume the few remaining intact remnants of this ecosystem, which are home to an estimated 1,900 endemic plant and animal species (Conservation International, 2007). Once covering an estimated 600,000 km2, only 10 to 15 percent of these forests remain. The West African cocoa industry which has been installed in this landscape by millions of small family farms has done so in some places benignly and in other cases less benignly and now accounts for more than 70 percent of global cocoa supply.

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