Wiebke Niether, Johanna Jacobi, Christian Andres, Wilma Hart and Laura Armengot from University of Göttingen (Germany), the Centre for Development and Environment of the University of Bern, ETH Zürich and the Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL) have published a meta-analysis in the Journal Environmental Research Letters comparing the agronomic, ecological, and socio-economic performance of cocoa agroforestry systems and monocultures.
The results of the study funded by the Swiss Cocoa Platform, indicate that cocoa agroforestry systems have the potential to compete with cocoa monocultures in terms of economic performance, and to outperform them in crucial system services such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as in total system yields. A knowledge gap on biodiversity conservation and pest and diseases was identified, but the very few articles found showed a significant higher number of species across taxa in agroforestry systems and a trend of a similar or even better performance of the agroforestry systems in terms of pests and diseases. Combined, the results underline the potential of agroforests to improve the sustainability of cocoa farms.
Despite the above-mentioned benefits of cocoa agroforestry systems, the often lower cocoa yield in agroforestry systems might still be one of the most relevant factors hindering a broader adoption of diversified production systems. Further research focused on increasing cocoa yields in agroforestry systems is therefore necessary (e.g., breeding for shade tolerant varieties or adapted management practices to increase pollination rates). In addition, building and enabling access to new markets and value chains for agroforestry products is also essential to promote agroforestry systems, as is compensating farmers for cocoa yield reductions through fair prices for sustainable cocoa production or carbon storage.
The study also identified the need to address knowledge gaps on the role of different shade trees, farm management strategies, pricing policies, cultural and social services of agroforests, and livelihood aspects.