Cacao Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Cacao Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Precolonial maya s of Central America described cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, cocoa butter, and cocoa powder, as the “food of the gods.” But since the early to mid-19th century, when Europeans developed milk chocolate and solid chocolate, cocoa has certainly become a culinary delight for humans. Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is the tree that produces the cocoa beans from which cocoa is derived. The crop’s origin is the Amazon Basin, and today 75 percent of cacao is cultivated in broadly similar humid lowland tropical forest environments, within 8 degrees of the equator.

Sweeping Changes in Production

The history of cacao production for markets is a history of remarkable changes-socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological. Globally, cacao production levels tell a story of change that shows a historical trend of significantly rising output. The collective output of the four largest producers of cocoa beans Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia, and Brazil (in order of rank from the largest producer)-expanded in recent decades by over 650 percent, from 381, 000 metric tons in 1951 to 2,889,774 metric tons in 2005 (which is 81 percent of the 2005 global cocoa bean output of 3,552,586 metric tons). Nationally, cocoa products have made sizeable contributions to government tax revenues, foreign exchange earnings, national income, and employment. For instance, in Ghana, the cocoa economy has established itself as a major component of the national economy since the late 19th century, when cocoa exports began. While the relative economic contributions of cocoa have declined as Ghana’s economic activities have expanded, the cocoa sector remains important, contributing a fifth of total export income of about $1.9 billion in 2001. The 23 percent of rural households involved in cacao production are the source of 83 percent of Ghana’s cocoa income.

The story of change associated with cacao production is also a local story. Locally, the commercial production of cacao has been historically a vehicle of modernization and social change that brought increased trade and other economic activities, as well as greater access to transportation and formal education. Also, social differentiation and gender relations in cacao producing societies have been influenced by access to income and wealth from cocoa sales. In West Africa, a region that produces over 70 percent of global cocoa beans, cacao production increasingly drew rural dwellers into commercial activity that transformed relations of production, changed land and labor relations, and modified processes of access to land and labor. Within the rural settings where cacao is produced, land transactions have become more commercialized and land rights more exclusive (to provide land tenure security for cacao farmers), compared to pre-cacao production customary practices and rights. Changes have also occurred in the types of labor employed by the rural cacao farmers. For instance, the use of hired labor increased with cacao production, but so did problems of labor motivation and control in this labor-intensive enterprise. And since 2000, a more troubling observation in Cote d’Ivoire is the reemergence of an early 20th-century practice of increasing use of forced child labor on cacao plantations. As in all capitalist enterprises, keeping costs of labor and other cacao production costs low is a key to profit making. And keeping costs of production low at all levels of the cocoa supply chain from the cultivation of cacao to its manufacture into other valueadded cocoa products is what ultimately translates into the cheap chocolate consumed in ever larger quantities in Europe and North America.

Impact on Environment

The impacts of changes in the environment-society relations associated with cacao production are garnering increased attention. Cacao production marks a shift in the way societies managed their environment. Prior to the introduction of export crops, the bush fallow/shifting cultivation agroforestry system of agriculture, involving the recycling of land between cultivation and forest fallow, had little permanent effects on farmlands. The soils and forest vegetation had enough time to regenerate after a short period of cropping. Also, the scale of ecological disturbance was small, as much of the production was for subsistence.

The fact that cacao trees are widely cultivated under the shade cover of natural indigenous canopy trees that are left standing as farms are made, or cultivated under a planted canopy of trees, would intuitively suggest that the ecological impacts of cacao production in tropical forests would be minimal. However, cacao production simplifies a complex ecosystem. The under-story vegetation of forests is drastically suppressed, and the density of the upper-story canopy trees is severely altered to make room for cacao trees. And an increasing number of farmers are completely eliminating shade trees on monospecies cacao farms to boost their yields in high-chemical input farms. Biodiversity is thus endangered and threatened over time, and so are a variety of ecological processes, whose absence depletes soil nutrients and increase pests and fungal and viral diseases on cacao farms. A further environmental issue is the use of agrochemicals to sustain short-run cacao yields and its implications for environmental contamination and human health.

Declining yields (often after 20 to 25 years of cultivation) in the old cacao producing frontiers, as soils decline in fertility and as cacao pests and diseases proliferate, make production unsustainable and have led to the search for richer soils and exploitation of new forests, in a cycle of destruction in which the biotic and edaphic components of the environment deteriorate over time. In just 20 years (1984-2004), the size of the area from which cocoa beans were harvested within tropical forests increased by 2.2 to 7 million hectares, and much of this 47 percent increase came from the four leading cocoa bean producers, particularly from Indonesia.

The impact of cacao production has been truly global in scope; from the global indulgence in chocolate treats to the role of cacao production as a major threat to global biodiversity. Cacao production has yet another potential global impact: the potential of ameliorating biodiversity decline and global warming through well-managed cacao farms that grow cacao under a wide variety of planted shade vegetation species and that retain an array of natural vegetation life forms in the tropical forests.

Bibliography:

Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993);
Ghana Statistical Service, Ghana Living Standards Survey: A Report of the Fourth Round (GLSS 4) (Ghana Statistical Service, 2000);
Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), The State of the Ghanaian Economy (ISSER, various years);
Robert Rice and Russell Greenberg, “Cacao Cultivation and the Conservation of Biological Diversity,” Ambio (v.29/3, 2000);
Elliot Schrage and Anthony Ewing, “The Cocoa Industry and Child Labor,” Journal of Corporate Citizenship (v.18, 2005).