Cocoa farmers need more than technical support to adopt agroforestry: lessons from Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea

For a cocoa farmer, planting a shade tree is a wager on the future. The shade tree offers benefits that may take years to materialise, while the farmer has to find suitable seedlings and decide whether the investment makes sense on land they may be uncertain they will continue to farm on. And planting is only part of the calculation. The cocoa still has to be sold, payments have to arrive when they are needed, and increasingly, buyers need to know where the beans came from. 

Two new CGIAR reports on cocoa value chains in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea examine this wider set of conditions. Both see scope for more agroforestry and deforestation-free production. But they also show why technical support, on its own, will not get farmers very far. The choices made on a cocoa farm are shaped not only by the technical support a farmer receives but also by what is available beyond farm  boundaries, from planting material and finance to the people who buy and transport the crop. 

Why farmers may hesitate to invest in shade trees 

Cocoa is woven deeply into the Côte d’Ivoire’s rural economy, yet many of the farmers producing it are contending with deforestation, ageing trees, uncertain incomes, limited access to finance and uneven extension support. Against that backdrop, planting shade trees can be both sensible and difficult. The benefits may arrive gradually, while the costs are immediate. A farmer who is unsure of long-term rights to the land, or who needs cash soon after harvest, has little room for investments whose returns lie years ahead. 

That pressure for immediate income also helps explain the durability of the pisteur, the informal aggregator who travels to remote farms to buy cocoa. From the standpoint of traceability, the arrangement is problematic as transactions may leave little or no farm-level record. Yet from the farmer’s standpoint, the pisteur solves a different problem ie he comes to the farm and, crucially, he pays. 

The role of aggregators in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa trade 

This is where attempts to make cocoa supply chains more sustainable can become complicated. Removing an informal actor may improve one part of the system while weakening another. The challenge is how to preserve the service farmers rely on while making the transaction more transparent and accountable. 

The Côte d’Ivoire report identifies several ways to strengthen the services around farmers. Aggregators could be registered within traceability systems so that their purchases are recorded. Cooperatives could provide certification, credit and record-keeping alongside marketing. Input suppliers could provide suitable planting material and technical advice, while processors could offer a more reliable market for cocoa that meets sustainability standards. 

While these arrangements sound plausible on paper, implementation is rather tricky. Some cooperatives already face governance problems and delays in paying farmers. Aggregators will need clear contracts and incentives if they are expected to take on record-keeping. Input suppliers need enough technical knowledge to recommend appropriate planting material, not simply sell what they have in stock. Can these arrangements provide those services reliably and still work as businesses? 

Building support for agroforestry in Guinea 

Guinea presents a different version of the same challenge. Its cocoa sector is smaller and more informal, with little formal finance, limited public extension and very little domestic processing. In some areas, roads become difficult during the rainy season, narrowing farmers’ access to markets and services. Planting material may be chosen less from a catalogue of recommended varieties than from whatever happens to be available nearby. 

Yet the idea of growing trees alongside cocoa is hardly foreign to farmers there. Those interviewed for the Guinea report described systems that include kola, avocado, citrus and timber species. The challenge is to help farmers manage these systems deliberately over time by choosing appropriate species, controlling shade and maintaining productive cocoa trees after a project ends. 

In Guinea, as in Côte d’Ivoire, the farm is only one part of the problem. Input suppliers may be able to offer advice as well as seedlings. Trained aggregators could help carry traceability into places where cooperatives are still weak. Local processors could give farmers a steadier outlet for sustainably produced cocoa and keep more of the crop’s value in the country. 

The comparison with Côte d’Ivoire is useful because it shows the limits of a single reform model. Côte d’Ivoire has a large cocoa economy and networks that can be improved, formalised or better connected but Guinea still has to build those systems. The two countries may be working toward similar goals, but they are not working with the same institutions or market conditions .  

This is what makes the enabling environment so important. It is not a single intervention or a set of services delivered to farmers. It is the combination of conditions that makes agroforestry possible in practice: access to planting material, finance, extension, markets and traceability, alongside the institutions and incentives that allow these systems to function. These conditions are different in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, and therefore the pathways to scale will be different too. 

That distinction is easy to lose when agroforestry is treated as a matter of persuading farmers to plant more trees. Farmers are being asked to invest before all the benefits are clear. Traceability depends on records surviving each transaction. Credit has to follow the uneven timing of agricultural income, and buyers have to offer markets farmers can rely on. 

Making sustainability work for farmers 

While the two reports do not claim that the business models they describe have already reduced deforestation or lowered emissions, they do identify the relationships that may determine whether more sustainable practices can be adopted at all. 

And these relationships need to be tested to find out whether the proposed arrangements can attract finance, whether farmers use them and, if they succeed, how much of the value reaches smaller producers. 

Authors: by Angie Sánchez and George Amahnui 

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR Climate Action Program. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/