A cocoa boom in southeast Liberia is wiping out native forests and encroaching into a proposed national park. The would-be Kwa National Park, a dense tropical rainforest, is home to chimpanzees, forest elephants, pygmy hippos and pangolins.
Kwa is partly located in Grand Gedeh county, one of the most densely forested regions in southeast Liberia. Commercial agriculture is banned across the 1,720 square-kilometer (664 square-mile) area set aside for the national park, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.
Yet, during patrols, forest rangers from Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) and community eco-guards, such as George Bowey with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, have discovered illegal cocoa plantations inside the park’s boundaries. Much of the forest around Kwa has already been cleared for cacao by people who live nearby.
“At the end of 2023, we started seeing cocoa going closer to the park, but to enter the park it was last year,” Bowey said.
Mukpo accompanied Bowey through the dense canopy of Kwa to reach a massive 100-hectare (250-acre) cacao plantation full of leafless, rotting trees and waist-high cacao saplings. On their way back to a ranger camp, Mukpo and Bowey passed other cacao plantations within Kwa, all showing signs of burns on trees.
Cacao can be grown in one of two ways: Saplings can be intercropped with other tree species to form a diverse ecosystem; or gasoline can be poured at the base of trees and their roots set on fire, effectively killing trees to make way for cacao. It’s the second method that migrant cacao workers from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire have brought to Kwa.
Since these plantations have appeared in Kwa, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) seem to have fled deeper into the park, Bowey said.
Grand Gedeh county borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s biggest exporter of cacao beans. As recently as 2020, 99% of the county was covered by natural forests. Since then, forest cover has been in decline as Liberian landowners have cashed in on the cocoa fever, offering their forest land to migrant workers from Côte d’Ivoire in exchange for a share in the earnings.
Forests in southeastern Liberia are communally owned, and laws regulate how they can be leased for commercial agriculture.
Yei Neagor, in-charge of the FDA’s regional headquarters in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh’s capital, told Mongabay the enforcement mandate of the agency is limited. FDA rangers can mostly operate within forests where commercial cacao farming is banned under the terms of co-management agreements between the FDA and local communities. In those forests, they arrest the migrant workers, but not the Liberians who hired them. Neagor added she’s been instructed not to destroy any mature cacao trees, even those planted illegally in protected areas like Kwa.
“We sit and fold our hands and watch the forest going,” she said. “Generations will judge us tomorrow.”
Read the full story by Ashoka Mukpo here.
Banner image: Community eco-guard George Bowey in an illegal cacao farm in the proposed Kwa National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.
