Highlights: Focus on agriculture

Four areas are highlighted to ensure productive and resilient ecosystems for subsistence farmers through the economically important cash crop ‑ cocoa: halting land degradation, halting deforestation, restoring land through agroforestry practices for resilient cocoa production and land certification.

Halting land degradation and soil erosion is critical. More than 10 percent of Côte d'Ivoire’s lands were degraded between 2000 and 2010, with the pace of degradation increasing subsequently. This has also had an impact on biodiversity. Improved management of land for subsistence agriculture would address declining productivity — a major drag on reducing rural poverty — and increase resilience to climate shocks. Efforts to do this in northern regions and the poorest areas could be prioritized. In one possible step for climate‑smart agriculture, providing supplementary irrigation to communities without increasing pumping emissions would protect the most vulnerable from climate impacts and other shocks. Such steps would have important synergies with the National Productive Safety Net Program, which provides support to rural diversification and helps build resilience through behavioural change among the most vulnerable farmers, particularly women. In the short run, efforts should focus on rendering agriculture more productive and less land‑consuming, moving to higher value agriculture that can potentially create jobs and reduce poverty.

Stopping deforestation, increasing agroforestry‑cocoa production, and further improving the outlook for cocoa exports. Cocoa is critically important for both Côte d'Ivoire’s economy and rural livelihoods. Cocoa represents 40 percent of export earnings (2021). But it is also important locally; with 1 million smallholders growing cocoa, it is the lifeblood of the southern rural economy. However, cocoa expansion has come at the cost of massive deforestation — Côte d'Ivoire has lost more than 80 percent of its forest cover since the 1960s. Deforestation in turn has had a negative impact on cocoa production, since cocoa trees benefit from shade. It also has micro‑climate impacts; the removal of trees has a heating effect on land, and precipitation becomes less likely. Climate change is already shifting cocoa‑growing zones, and half of the currently suitable growing areas will no longer be viable by 2050. Recent European Union (EU) regulations impose import restrictions on products linked to deforestation. That will have a detrimental impact for Côte d'Ivoire unless growers can prove their products did not cause deforestation using traceability schemes. Making cocoa sustainable is therefore intrinsically linked to its value proposition. Overall, the cost of inaction for Côte d'Ivoire is estimated at around US$1.0 billion in 2050, reducing agriculture GDP by 4.5 percent. When added to the restriction of deforestation‑linked cocoa exports to the EU, this amounts to a cost of US$2 billion in 2050, equivalent to 9 percent of agriculture GDP.

Land certification and tenure. It is therefore critical to use legislation and other regulatory levers, such as village boundary delimitation and customary land registration, which also validates landowners’ rights to the trees on their land, to slow or halt deforestation and to improve the asset‑ownership of poor and vulnerable farmers. This, alongside better local land management practices, such as the introduction of agroforestry, will both improve the productivity of land and increase resilience to climate impacts for the poorest communities. It will also strengthen women’s agency, as they are under‑represented in cocoa farming, and generally have the lowest resilience. In addition, improving their access to productive capital can allow them to move into more sustainable agricultural value chains.

The combination of deforestation and aggressive‑but‑low‑productivity agriculture expansion has led to high greenhouse gas emissions, contributing 62 percent of total emissions, the highest of any sector. Whilst Côte d'Ivoire will be one of the first countries in West Africa, after Ghana, to benefit from climate finance as the area around the Taï National Park is reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) for which it will be compensated, much remains to be done for this to be replicated elsewhere. Ensuring that these REDD+ benefits reach the poor will strengthen the credibility of the program with local communities.

Climate change will also impact livestock and other productive land uses, seriously affecting the livelihoods of poor farmers. Ensuring sustainable land and livestock practices will have benefits far beyond cocoa production. However, despite the political will, there are concerns over the lack of finance to implement these strategies for the preservation and management of the country’s forest and land resources. Contradictory and overlapping policies and regulations also need to be addressed.