Climate-smart cocoa in Ghana: Examining discourses, trade-offs and implications for cocoa smallholders

Abstract: Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a concept to address the multiple challenges and interdependencies of agriculture and climate change. Within CSA debates, equity and agroecology are especially contested. In Ghana, the concept of climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to simultaneously respond to high rates of deforestation, climate change pressures and low productivity of cocoa – Ghana’s principal agricultural export. Since CSC in Ghana is a nascent concept, it has received very little academic or critical appraisal. By applying a meta-discourse framework, this study aimed at gaining insights into local CSC discourses in Ghana and how these reflect global environmental meta-discourses. The adoption of certain discourses can reveal insights into subsequent policies and their implications for already marginalised cocoa smallholders. My findings are based on 37 qualitative interviews with cocoa smallholders, extension officers as well as governmental, non-governmental and private sector representatives of Ghana’s cocoa sector. Overall, my results suggest that an ecological modernisation discourse was the most pronounced meta-discourse reflected within CSC. A sustainable intensification discourse was the most common CSC practice to achieve a win-win between environment and development aspirations. Agroecological practices within CSC were mainly adopted to serve ecological modernisation discourses and are thus diametrically opposed to those promoted by more radical meta-discourses. Issues of contextual equity, especially regarding tree tenure, were ubiquitous, and discussed by a large majority of cocoa stakeholders. I caution that an overly simplistic win-win approach risks side-lining contextual equity issues and complexities regarding shade cover and agrochemical input. Community Resource Management Area Mechanisms (CREMAs) and other local governance mechanisms represent promising ways to balance trade-offs within the dominant CSC discourse by giving cocoa smallholders a stronger voice. However, given the dominance of large agricultural actors – such as foreign chocolate companies – within the current political economy of Ghana’s cocoa sector, this study cautions not to overestimate the potential of these local governance structures.