GUEST PERSPECTIVE | Côte d’Ivoire
Crop Production: A Threat to Côte d’Ivoire’s Protected Forests
C
ôte d’Ivoire, a country located in West Africa, has an economy that depends largely on forest resource exploitation. A significant portion of Côte d’Ivoire’s GDP comes from natural or planted forest products, including teak, oil palm, silk-cotton (Ceiba Tree), rubber, edible and medicinal plants and coconut. Indeed, agriculture contributes 27 percent to GDP, employs two-thirds of the active population and provides the agro-industrial sector with 40 percent of export earnings. The country has two main forest types: evergreen and semi-deciduous rainforest (Guilllaumet and Adajanohoun 1971). Côte d’Ivoire has a tropical forest corridor that extends inland for nearly 150 kilometers from the southwest coast. Because Côte d’Ivoire’s forest ecosystems lie primarily in this region, the people and industry of the country also migrate here to take advantage of the forest’s rich biodiversity. In recent history, we have seen a massive migration of Ivorian and expatriate communities to the country’s southwest region. The population of foreign origin represents 26 percent of the total population (Ministére du plan et du Développement 2009).
Dr. Aboua Gustave Senior Lecturer Environmental Sociology University of Abobo-Adjamé Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
Migrants settle in communities within and nearby the country’s protected forests, and they use the forest’s resources, namely timber, plant oils, bamboo, palm raphia and rattan for basketry, rubber and wild meat, to meet their basic needs. Many of these migrants settle indefinitely, establishing a living from subsistence or industrial crop production and timber harvesting. It is estimated from 1990-2000, there was a deforestation rate of 265,000 hectares per year in Côte d’Ivoire (FAO 2005). The sustainability of Côte d’Ivoire’s forests is contingent upon the resource management of the communities that live there. For example, one of Côte d’Ivoire’s regions, the Marahoué, is home to one of the country’s largest national parks. Marahoué National Park
was established in 1968 (by the law 68-80 of 09 February 1968), and originally covered 101,000 hectares. Over the last decade Marahoué National Park has lost 93 percent of its forest cover due to deforestation and human settlement. Today, the park exists primarily in name only, as expanding agriculture activities have destroyed Marahoué’s endemic zones (Laugini 2007). The rapid depletion of protected forests in Côte d’Ivoire demands political will from the government in order to protect these valuable forests from over-exploitation. A large portion of the country’s deforestation is driven by increasing rural poverty and a need for subsistence agriculture, supplemented by high rates of illegal logging and timber theft (ITTO 2005). Given this, we must ask how the Nation-state of Côte d’Ivoire can reconcile the necessity for agricultural land with the importance of forest preservation. How can it create policies that consider the livelihood of the rural poor and the long term value of forest conservation?
AFRICA 2009 | Footprint Factbook | 37