GRAND GEDEH, Liberia – In the past century, most of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest has been lost to commercial agriculture, infrastructure development and logging.
More than half of what’s left is in Liberia, and the remaining rainforest now faces a threat that’s already driven much of the region’s deforestation: cacao production.
In the past few years, the rush to plant cacao has been on in southeastern Liberia, destroying vast tracts of forest. After reviewing satellite data that shows massive forest loss, Mongabay visited the region to investigate what’s driving the industry’s rapid expansion and who is profiting from it.
In this episode of Chasing Deforestation, we travel deep into Liberia’s rainforests to speak with migrant cocoa workers, forest rangers and community landowners. Join us in our journey from a protected chimpanzee habitat to the European Parliament, as we examine whether these forests will survive the world’s appetite for chocolate.
Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in touch with us here!
Banner image: A collage featuring Ashoka Mukpo, a Mongabay reporter, and a cocoa bean.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
1 Grand Gedeh is crazy for cocoa.
I mean, you find it
with common people in the community.
You find it with people in government.
You find it
with people outside of the county.
They are call in it the brown gold.
And everybody is in search of it.
Here we met George.
He works with the Wild
Chimpanzee Foundation.
He’s trying to protect
this part of the forest
from illegal cocoa farming.
There’s a very unique landscape
where some
species that you don’t find vin
teh entire world..
he Western chimpanzee,
we have elephants, we have hippo.
We have some tigers.
Are we going to see chimpanzees?
It will be difficult
right now in the name of cocoa farming.
People are destroying the forest.
What are you guys here
doing to try to address this issue?
We are patrolling on a daily basis
to see anyone we find within this park.
We pull them out of the park,
and we sensitize
and let them understand that
this place is a proposed national park,
a reserve.
We are about to
enter one of the biggest cocoa farms
within the proposed national park..
This is one of them.
This, this. This farm is in.
Greer wants us to try.
Wow.
This is much bigger than I thought
it was going to be.
This is huge. It’s very big.
It would be around 100
hectares.
So these cocoa trees,
those ones down there, right?
Yeah, these are the Cocos trees.
And they’re
very small,
so it seems like this is new..Yeah, it’s
new, new..
How old is this?
People have been coming to this place
recently, like a year ago.
Right now,
it feels a little bit like it’s
cocoa versus the forest in Liberia.
And I think cocoa was winning, right?
Yeah, yeah. Cocoa is winning the battle.
And very fast.
It seems that we found some workers….
they are running .
These are some of the Burkinabe.
We’re here to do cocoa production,
and it’s been caught on an illegal farm.
I think that once a week is the forest
will go up.
Reports of Burkina Faso work.
Like who?
Whose job is to inform this kids
that it’s illegal to be here.
You know this is host job.
Yes, this host job.
Well, he wouldn’t do it, you know,
and most of the times
they are more interested
in the conservation
rather than all of it.
You got to just feel.
I mean, it’s just natural
to feel so much sympathy for this kid,
you know?
I mean, that’s like,
you know, first of all,
he should be in school.
I don’t I don’t I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
But if the community knows
that these guys
are being exposed
to this kind of risk of arrest,
why do they keep sending them here
to the forest to work?
The immigrants began to pull in.
I would say a Cocoa rush
started taking place in the count.
They just came here
for some economic opportunities.
And it’s really like a lot
of the Liberian communities
are inviting them and bringing them in.
Yeah, right.
Many of them are not bad
they came to look for greener pastures.
What is our local people, our citizne
they want our causing the trouble for us
because our money they will for it
carry the people in it
for us is for protecting.
It is not legal.
I agree
with them. That is not illegal.
But yes, but I live on the land
now.
If you say I shouldn’t do,
what do you expect me to do?
How do you say to live?
Five years ago there was no cocoa.
And how did that change things for us?
Yeah, it transformed our lives.
Before you could not see houses, you
see huts,
but for now the life of the town
has been transform.
It’s not just villagers like this.
Big landowners are also farming cocoa.
Local officials
have been implicated
in corruption around some deals.
Cocoa is becoming big business.
And Grand Gina from the forest here.
Local distributors
feed it into global supply chains.
But we are off to a Zleh city
hat’s, hat is where the brokers
association is situated.
And we a re going to talk
to a guys name Lincoln,
If you think the farmers make money,
check the brokers
they really win money they run the show.
At every step in the supply chain,
the coca rises in price
and so do profits.
The business now
is this increasing on a daily basis
because of the cocoa work.
So it seems like,
you know, even though it’s
maybe bad
for the forest here,
there’s a lot of people that feel like
their life is improving.
My life is improving,
you see the business that I am making
now are from cocoa.
Do you ever think about where
all this cocoa is going?
We are very curious
to know where our cooca is going.
So you guys don’t really even know
who’s buying the cocoa,
which company it goes to
when the prices get sent us.
Absolutely,
we do not know which company
it is—whether a European
or an American company,.
We don’t know.
You’re just blind. You’re in this year’s.
We’re just here because we were living,
you know, in poverty.
And we’re seeing the cocoa
bringing little money to us.
So where does all this cocoa go?
Distributors like Lincoln sell
most of it to exporters in the capital.
From there,
more than half of
it is shipped to Europe,
which is Liberia’s top customer.
But EU legislators
have passed a law meant
to keep
these deforestation linked products
out of European markets,
which could derail the Liberian trade.
I met with one of them
in the European Parliament.
The European Deforestation
Regulation aims to take up
European responsibility
for the destruction of forests.
What we are offering by setting standards
for the European market
is actually
possibilities to have a more sustainable
agricultural production
in the
original countries
and to make sure that we stop
this one sided exploitation of resources
and actually giving a more
sustainable trade relation.
The EU
supporters say it will
help keep forests
like the ones in grand good standing.
It should have gone into force in 2024
instead after a backlash in Europe,
it’s been delayed twice.
So one has to be very clear
that the delays,
they are not the technical issues.
It’s not about implementation.
It’s a political decision.
We we see a lot of pressure,
especially also coming
from within the EU, from some industries.
Much of the cocoa we saw in Grand GT
was illegally farmed under the EU ADR.
It would likely be blocked in the world’s
biggest market for it.
I can understand that this might exclude
Liberian farmers from the market,
but still,
it could be an excuse for other farmers
in countries to actually don’t work
on sustainable practices.
We have to make sure
that sustainable practices
are supported, and cutting forests
is something that breaches the law.
It’s clear that there’s
no simple way
to stop deforestation
in southeastern Liberia.
But for now,
what’s happening
there is an old familiar story.
Much of the rainforest
in Cote
d’Ivoire has been lost
to the cocoa industry.
Unless something changes,
Liberia looks like it could be next.
Source:
news.mongabay.com