Rebecca Ashley
Hometown: Norwich, Vermont/USA
Advisor: William Burch

Learning from cocoa farmers’ adaptation strategies to forest degradation in Ghana: The environmental, economic, and technology implications

In what ways do farmers adapt to environmental change? How can we learn from their strategies, and use their innovations to guide the development of technologies and policies that are rooted in social and ecological processes? From my past agroforestry research I have found that forest users and farmers are critical thinkers who are sensitive to the changes in their human and physical environments. This personal experience is corroborated by a strong body of literature that documents and supports indigenous and local knowledge, and confirms farmers’ tendencies to experiment, adapt and innovate (Chambers et al 1989, Sumberg and Okali 1997, Winarto 2004). Nonetheless, technology is typically created, tested, and disseminated by people from the outside who cannot anticipate the negative cultural, social, or organizational side effects (Song et al 2004). As a result, these technologies have not brought the intended environmental or economic benefits to rural populations.

For my doctoral research I plan to study the different ways in which Ghanaian cocoa farmers in the moist semi-deciduous forest zone (the older cocoa growing frontiers) are adapting to a reduction in available primary forest as they establish and manage new cocoa farms (0-7 years), given their varied access to natural and social resources. I will also examine the causes of these adaptation pathways and explore the environmental and economic outcomes of these adaptation choices. Through this research I hope to understand how different variables influence West African farmers’ choices, and to identify strategies and innovations that have value to local people so as to inform efforts across West Africa to sustain cocoa production, stabilize smallholder incomes, and conserve forest biodiversity through its use on-farm.

I am particularly grateful to the World Cocoa Foundation and to USAID’s International Agricultural Research Center Technical Services Program for their generous support of my research.