Liberia’s remote southeast, home to some of West Africa’s last remaining rainforests, is facing a deforestation crisis driven by cacao farming.Tens of thousands of workers from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire have migrated across the border in recent years, driven by land shortages and a price boom.This “cocoa rush” destroyed more forest in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county last year than in any county on record since 2002.
(GRAND GEDEH, Liberia) – Off in the woods beyond the ekki trees, a sharp crack cuts through the buzzing of insects.
“It’s a tree falling,” says George Bowey, a baby-faced community eco-guard who works here in the proposed Kwa National Park, a thick tropical rainforest in southeastern Liberia.
There are different ways to grow cacao. In one method, saplings are intercropped with other tree species so they form a diverse ecosystem. Or there’s another method, where plantation land is cleared by pouring gasoline on the base of native trees and setting their roots on fire so they wither and die.
This is the method that migrant cacao workers from nearby Côte d’Ivoire have brought into Kwa.
