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(IPS) Growing cocoa as a cash crop in Brazil and Ghana may provide a way for small farmers to break out of poverty while preserving some of the world's most ecologically threatened areas, according to researchers in Washington.

The researchers say they are not recommending that every tropical country in the world begin growing cocoa, because it is not suitable for every region and increased production would depress the global market price.

In certain circumstances, however, growing cocoa can generate more income for poor farmers, protect biological diversity and prevent soil erosion, they argue.

''Though it is not a panacea for the problems smallholder farmers face, cocoa offers many benefits to the poor in general, and to women in particular,'' says Agnes Quisumbing, a senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Cocoa is grown throughout the tropics and its production is expanding. West Africa — particularly Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria — produces roughly two-thirds of the world's crop.

After surveying 60 villages in western Ghana, the most active cocoa-growing region in the country, Quisumbing concludes that cocoa production is improving the lives of poor farmers because the crop can be grown with other food crops on small plots of land.

Good crop

Cocoa, unlike other cash-crops, can also thrive on less favoured soil and requires less water, fertilisers and pesticides, making it an especially good crop for poor farmers who do not have access to fertile land, according to her report, ''Empowering Women and Fighting Poverty: Cocoa and Land Rights in West Africa''.

Cultivating cocoa, she says, also provides women with economic security and a more secure way to gain rights to land.

''Cocoa farming is transforming the traditional view and status of women in these societies,'' says Quisumbing.

Under traditional land rights system in Ghana, land can be given to an individual who helps with tree planting. Women frequently help their husbands to plant and tend cocoa trees. In return, says Quisumbing, women are given part of the cocoa-cultivating land.

''Once land is given to a woman, it cannot be reclaimed by any family member, not even her husband,'' she says. This further benefits the rest of the household, according to the report, because poor women, unlike men, usually spend most of their additional income on food and education for their children.

Keijiro Otsuka, a professorial fellow at the Tokyo-based Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development, who worked on the report, says cocoa helps to protect the soil from erosion because it can be grown on marginal lands that cannot support many other types of crops.

On hillsides, for example, fertile soil is often washed away by rain. But cocoa, unlike other crops, can be grown on steep inclines.

'''Cocoa farming is very sustainable,'' says Otsuka.

At first glance, it may be hard to see much conservation potential in the cocoa tree, since in most places where it is grown, its relationship to the forests has hardly been benign, says Chris Bright, a senior researcher with the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.

The nearly seven million hectares (or 70,000 sq km) of land now cultivated for cocoa production worldwide was once virtually all tropical rainforests, says Bright. Yet cocoa is not always grown on cleared ground. Because the cocoa is adapted to shade, it is commonly maintained under some sort of loose canopy, either a thinned native forest or a tree plantation.

This ''shade tolerance'' says Bright, is a promising asset.

''Cocoa is one of those crops, like shade-grown coffee, that can supply an economic rationale for preserving tropical forest canopy, albeit in a modified state,'' he says.

Key to preserving ecosystem

Because cocoa thrives in biodiversity ''hotspots'' — a term used by ecologists referring to threatened ecosystems with high numbers of flora and fauna — the crop could be the key to preserving one of the world's most threatened areas, like Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, that is endangered by logging and development, he says.

''If we can create an environmentally-friendly form of production, we can supply an economic rationale for preserving existing fragments of the Atlantic rainforest, and even extend the forest back into areas from which it has long since vanished,'' says Bright.

Brazil's production of the world's cocoa has dropped to four percent down from 24 percent in 1983. About 50 to 60 percent of cocoa grown in the Northeast of Brazil is planted as the under story crop within a thinned forest, a system known as ''cabruca.'' In a cabruca along the coast of southern Bahia, near the Una Reserve, many forest animals are apparently using the area as a kind of supplement to their main habitat.

In one night, for example, the Una researchers found 23 bat species foraging in one cabruca stand, he says. The golden-headed lion tamarin, an endangered primate, also uses cabruca this way, he adds.

But he says business as usual for the cabruca farms will not be a successful tool for conservation. A ''forest friendly'' cocoa, he says, would need to embrace a new paradigm of tropical agro-forestry that would include organic methods and focus on shad-grown cocoa under native, regenerating forest.

Bright argues that switching to organic methods would not only increase biodiversity, but would improve Brazil's competitive edge, consumer appeal, and profits.

According to an organic cocoa programme run by the Brazilian environmental group IESB (Instituto de Estudos Socio-Ambientais do Sul da Bahia), certified organic farms had an increase in net profits of about 80 percent because they saved costs on expensive pesticides and fertilisers.

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