Abstract
Cocoa yields in Ghana remain low. This has variously been attributed to low rates of fertilizer application, pollinator limitation, and particularly dry growing conditions. In this paper we use an African forest-agriculture landscape dominated by cocoa (Theobroma cacao) to develop an ecological production function, allowing us to identify key ecological and management limits acting on cocoa yields simultaneously. These included more consistent application of fertilizers inter-annually, distributing rotting biomass throughout the farm and reducing the incidence of capsid attacks. By relaxing these limits, we estimate plausible increases in yields and, by extension, farm incomes. Our analysis reveals that resulting increases in cocoa yields requiring both ecological and intensive management interventions could be significant (113 ± 60%); however, benefits are disproportionately realized by the wealthiest households. We found that wealthier households benefited proportionally more from ecological intensification methods (e.g., leaving more rotting biomass in their farms) and the poorest households benefited proportionally more from capital-intensive intensification methods (e.g., pesticide and fertilizer applications). We treated poverty as multi-dimensional, and show that only certain dimensions of poverty (school attendance, assets, and food security) are significantly related to cocoa incomes, while several other dimensions (access to clean water, sanitation and electricity, and infant mortality) are not. We explore how increased household cocoa incomes could impact different dimensions of poverty. Our findings suggest, that if all households adopted the optimal level of each of these management options, and in so doing had similar poverty profiles to those households already managing optimally, we would see the community-averaged probability: a child of a household misses school decrease from 47 to 31%, a household would be able to acquire assets increase from 40 to 59% and a household would have access to an adequate amount of food increase from 62 to 79%.
Highlights
Yields were higher if cocoa trees were closer to rotting plant biomass, which included banana tree stems, piles of harvested cocoa shells, rotting fruit fallen from on-farm fruit trees and palm fronds
To consider whether age of cocoa farm was a factor related to forest distance, we modeled relationships between distance from forest and age of cocoa farm as well as soil characteristics such as available phosphorus, the ratio of carbon to nitrogen and potassium
We found that cocoa incomes were related to three poverty dimensions: education, assets2 and food security
Summary
With many of Africa’s low-income households dependent on small-scale agriculture and experiencing among the world’s highest yield gaps, efforts to support economic development across the continent are increasingly addressing the need to improve crop yields (Irz et al, 2001; Minten and Barrett, 2008; Kassie et al, 2011; Davis et al, 2012; Tittonell and Giller, 2013), which can improve both incomes and food security (Pretty et al, 2011; Tilman et al, 2011; Vanlauwe et al, 2014). Whilst some yield-enhancing ES occur “on-farm,” others can flow into a farm from less managed or “natural” areas in the landscape (Zhang et al, 2007; Klein, 2009; Power, 2010). These “off-farm” ES can be attributed to nearby intact habitat, such as forest conservation areas, if a landscape is organized more as a “land-sparing” scenario or diverse land-covers in a more “landsharing” design (Green et al, 2005; Tscharntke et al, 2005). The scale of a development-motivated, policy intervention is important depending on the ecosystem service (ES) being managed (Tittonell, 2014; Vanlauwe et al, 2014)
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