Research published in this special issue on cocoa agroforestry illustrates the multifunctional role of shade trees for sustaining cocoa production and improving farmers’ livelihoods, and addresses tradeoffs between higher cocoa yield and the provision of ecosystem services to local households and global society. Indeed, the use of diverse shade in cocoa cultivation is threatened by a new drive towards crop intensification. The removal of shade trees diminishes smallholders’ ability to adapt to global change driven by demographic pressure, food insecurity, cocoa price volatility and climate change. Some forms of crop intensification may reduce ecological resilience of cocoa production systems, making adaptation strategies, combining shade trees with innovative management practices, essential for sustaining cocoa yield. Managing trade-offs between yield and environmental services at the cocoa plot and landscape scales requires a multi-disciplinary approach to identify key management options that goes beyond the artificially polarized debates around intensified versus traditional agroforestry practices, or more generally, land-sparing versus land-sharing strategies. The global challenge facing the cocoa sector today is how to increase cocoa production to meet growing demand, without expanding the area under cocoa. This means finding sustainable ways to maintain cocoa production within today’s producing regions, particularly West Africa, through a series of technical innovations geared towards smallholders. Inappropriate intensification may result in heavy deforestation on new pioneer fronts, such as the Congo basin, and existing cocoa being replaced either by other agricultural commodities, or by less resilient and less environmentally friendly production practices.

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Trade-offs between crop intensification and ecosystem services: the role of agroforestry in cocoa cultivation

Cote d’Ivoire produces 40 % of the world supply of cocoa but much of the plantation area is aging and declining in productivity, while opportunities for land expansion into new forest land are quickly disappearing. Rejuvenation strategies for cocoa presently coalesce either around improved varieties and greater use of agro-chemical inputs in full sun systems or eco-certification that requires trees to be integrated with cocoa. Here, we explore the possibility of uniting these approaches through building on current farmer practice of incorporating trees in their cocoa fields to improve cocoa productivity and diversify their livelihoods. We interviewed 355 farmers about trees integrated in their cocoa fields across four locations in the South-West of Cote d’Ivoire in 2012, stratified by whether or not farmers were eco-certified. Despite the massive deforestation, a rich diversity of trees was found in cocoa fields and an overwhelming majority of farmers (95 %) wanted more trees and/or more tree species, regardless of their certification status or ethnic origin. There was a consensus that most trees were compatible with cocoa, but farmers also traded off negative impacts of some species against their productive contribution to their livelihood. Farmers valued tree diversity on their cocoa plots and provided detailed information on how 32 tree species interacted with cocoa in terms of soil moisture retention, soil fertility improvement and pest and disease interactions but also had key gaps in knowledge about alternative hosts of mirids and mistletoe. The majority of farmers were not aware of the certification requirements for tree species and shade cover but a much higher proportion of certified farmers (76 %) had received information about shade trees than non-certified farmers (15 %), although advice only related to eight tree species. Scope for building on local knowledge and practice to sustainably increase cocoa productivity through promoting tree diversity while enhancing other ecosystem service provision was identified and the next steps required to realize this set out.

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Farmers in Côte d’Ivoire value integrating tree diversity in cocoa for the provision of ecosystem services

Cacao agroforestry systems (CAFS) can provide supporting services such as optimum light conditions for cacao growth, water and nutrient cycling and regulating services such as pest and disease control and climate regulation. This review considers recent literature on the manifestation of these services in CAFS around the world to provide an overview of scientific knowledge. Crown structures of associated trees can facilitate optimum light conditions for cacao growth, and provide water through vertical root segregation. Leaf litter fall and roots from associated species contribute to nutrient cycling. Both nitrogen-fixing and non-nitrogen-fixing species can provide nutrients to the cacao plant, though competition from certain species may limit phosphorus and potassium uptake. Pest and disease regulating services can arise through careful shade management to create a microclimate which reduces susceptibility of cacao to fungal diseases and sun-loving pests. All CAFS store carbon to varying degrees; those resembling original forest much more than simple two-species systems from which shade trees are removed after maturity of the cacao stand. CAFS also promotes biodiversity conservation depending on structure, management, and landscape arrangement, though not to the extent of natural forests. Research opportunities to increase provision of these services include optimal spatial arrangement for nutrient cycling and functional diversity as well as landscape connectivity for biodiversity conservation. Trade-offs between carbon storage, biodiversity, cacao yield and socio-economic resilience are presented, indicating that optimization of ecosystem services in CAFS requires consideration of interactions between all services, including socio-cultural and economic ones.

Supporting and regulating ecosystem services in cacao agroforestry systems

This paper follows the transition from ethnobotany to a deeper scientific understanding of the food and medicinal properties of African agroforestry tree products as inputs into the start of domestication activities. It progresses on to the integration of these indigenous trees as new crops within diversified farming systems for multiple social, economic and environmental benefits. From its advent in the 1990s, the domestication of indigenous food and non-food tree species has become a global programme with a strong African focus. This review of progress in the third decade is restricted to progress in Africa, where multi-disciplinary research on over 59 species has been reported in 759 research papers in 318 science publications by scientists from over 833 research teams in 70 countries around the world (532 in Africa). The review spans 23 research topics presenting the recent research literature for tree species of high priority across the continent, as well as that in each of the four main ecological regions: the humid zone of West and Central Africa; the Sahel and North Africa; the East African highlands and drylands; and the woody savannas of Southern Africa. The main areas of growth have been the nutritional/medicinal value of non-timber forest products; the evaluation of the state of natural resources and their importance to local people; and the characterization of useful traits. However, the testing of putative cultivars; the implementation of participatory principles; the protection of traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights; and the selection of elite trees and ideotypes remain under-researched. To the probable detriment of the upscaling and impact in tropical agriculture, there has been, at the international level, a move away from decentralized, community-based tree domestication towards a laboratory-based, centralized approach. However, the rapid uptake of research by university departments and national agricultural research centres in Africa indicates a recognition of the importance of the indigenous crops for both the livelihoods of rural communities and the revitalization and enhanced outputs from agriculture in Africa, especially in West Africa. Thus, on a continental scale, there has been an uptake of research with policy relevance for the integration of indigenous trees in agroecosystems and their importance for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To progress this in the fourth decade, there will need to be a dedicated Centre in Africa to test and develop cultivars of indigenous crops. Finally, this review underpins a holistic approach to mitigating climate change, as well as other big global issues such as hunger, poverty and loss of wildlife habitat by reaping the benefits, or ‘profits’, from investment in the five forms of Capital, described as ‘land maxing’. However, policy and decision makers are not yet recognizing the potential for holistic and transformational adoption of these new indigenous food crop opportunities for African agriculture. Is ‘political will’ the missing sixth capital for sustainable development?

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The Future of Food: Domestication and Commercialization of Indigenous Food Crops in Africa over the Third Decade (2012–2021)

The growing demand for cocoa beans and products worldwide has been met by expanding the area under cocoa production while productivity per hectare has stagnated at a low level of around 450 kg/ha per year in the last decade. Throughout the tropics cocoa has increasingly been cultivated in full-sun monocultures in order to maximize short-term productivity and profitability, which has been associated with soil erosion and degradation, biodiversity loss, as well as increased susceptibility to climate change impacts and pests and diseases. Dynamic agroforestry systems are an alternative production method which has long been practiced in Latin American countries such as Bolivia. Through mimicking natural forests, these systems offer multiple benefits such as soil fertility enhancement, reduction in pest and disease pressure, erosion control, and revenue diversification. In Cote d’Ivoire, where most cocoa is still produced in monocultures, dynamic agroforestry systems were recently introduced on a small scale.

Cocoa in Monoculture and Dynamic Agroforestry

Agroforestry systems in humid tropical areas are complex multispecies cropping systems whose value for farmers is often hard to assess. We present the findings of a participatory assessment that we applied to cocoa agroforestry systems. This assessment, adapted from the pebble distribution method, was used to quantify the value given by farmers to each species of their cocoa agroforestry system according to the attributed uses. A tree inventory in 50 cocoa agroforests was carried out in central Cameroon. Overall, 122 non-cocoa tree species were inventoried. The mean species richness was 23 species per plot and the mean Shannon index was 2.42, for a mean density of 180 non-cocoa trees ha−1 and 1,511 cocoa trees ha−1. Cocoa farmers defined seven different uses for tree species, including Theobroma cacao. 81 % of the species (including cocoa trees) had one to seven uses whereas the highest use value was given to T. cacao, with a mean score of 23.6 %. Then, in descending order, the 10 non-cocoa species with the highest use values were Dacryodes edulis, Persea americana, Elaeis guineensis, Citrus sinensis, Mangifera indica, Milicia excelsa, Cola nitida, Citrus sp., Ricinodendron heudelotii, and Terminalia superba. The frequency of non-cocoa species was significantly and positively correlated with their use value (R2 = 0.914). Our results showed that technical innovations designed to improve cocoa agroforestry systems should take into account farmers’ knowledge to propose them systems so as to be able to more effectively address their expectations.

Farmers’ assessment of the use value of agrobiodiversity in complex cocoa agroforestry systems in central Cameroon

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Farmers’ assessment of the use value of agrobiodiversity in complex cocoa agroforestry systems in central Cameroon