Abstract
The cocoa economy of Ivory Coast started in the eastern part of the country in the 1970s and spread to the central-western and then south-western regions. For nearly a decade, it has been in the West of Ivory Coast with a population increase caused by large waves of migration. This study aims to determine different factors explaining dynamics of the cocoa economy from the East to West of Ivory Coast. The method adopted consisted of processing Landsat images from 1985–2018 and an individual survey of 278 heads of households. The results obtained showed that the development of the cocoa economy led forest cover degradation with a total loss estimated at 60.80%, 46.39%, 20.76% and 51.18% of forest area in the East, Centre-West, South-West and West, respectively. The creation of new cocoa farms in the West of Ivory Coast is governed by non-native people (51.13%) settled between 2010 and 2018. About 41% of these producers come mainly from the Centre-West (25%) and the South-West (16%). In addition, 29% of producers come from the West of Ivory Coast. Despite the abiotic characteristics being considered unfavourable, the west of Ivory Coast is in the process of becoming the country’s new zone of high cocoa production.
Highlights
The different uses of forest land and their evolution lead to the degradation of forest areas and their subsequent loss
The main objective of this study is to determine the different factors explaining the dynamics of the cocoa economy from the east of Ivory Coast to the West
This study was conducted in Ivory Coast, a Western African country located between 4◦ and 11◦
Summary
The different uses of forest land and their evolution lead to the degradation of forest areas and their subsequent loss. Ivory Coast, a sub-Saharan African country, was the tropical African country with the highest deforestation during the 1990s [2]. In this deforestation dynamic, the area of dense humid forest in this country, which was estimated at over 16 million hectares in the 1950s, has considerably decreased to about 2 million hectares [3]. Agriculture constitutes the main economic sector for several African countries It accounts for 17% of the GDP of the continent as a whole and 30% of that of sub-Saharan African countries [5].
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