Speaker
Description
Historically, cocoa cultivation in Côte d'Ivoire has moved from the east in the mid-20th century to the west of the country in recent years. The preferred method of cocoa cultivation is on previous forest land use, after clearing and burning the primary forest and girdling the residual trees (Norris et al., 2010). Today, there are 4.4 Mha of cocoa cropping systems cropped by around one million farmers (FAOSTAT, 2024). The average yield per hectare has been declining steadily for the past twenty years, from 700kg of dry beans per hectare to 500kg ha-1. In addition, the market price for chemical or organic inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, which could help alleviate these problems, is substantially rising, while the investment capacity of farm households is declining. As a result, farmers are using few or no inputs to improve soil quality or combat pests and diseases. Consequently, there is an urgent need to find agroecological solutions that farmers can implement autonomously to restore the support, regulation and production functions of their cocoa plots.
With the aim of identifying innovative practices to address these issues, a participatory design process is currently underway in three villages in Côte d'Ivoire, each located within a different historical cocoa-growing loop. The choice to work in three zones where cocoa farming has been established at different periods was made so as to cover a diversity of issues. These zones are broadly differentiated by the age of the cocoa agroforestry systems (CAFS) found there: from ageing in the east of the country (80 years on average), to mature in the center (25 years on average), to young in the west (10 years on average). Working with twenty farmers in each village, the participatory design process involved three stages. Firstly, an individual agronomic diagnosis of the CAFS is led, in the form of an in situ interview with the farmer. Secondly, fourteen workshops are set up in each village, combining discussions and field work, to (i) define common co-design objectives and (ii) jointly develop technical solutions based on constructive exchanges between farmer and researcher participants. Thirdly, an experimental protocol adapted to the co-design process participants is set up to establish a prototype of these co-designed technical solutions in situ, in the plots of volunteer cocoa farmers who had taken part in the approach.
Problems common to all three villages related to (i) the decline in soil fertility, due to the depletion of soil resources (Tondoh et al., 2015), and (ii) the resurgence of cocoa tree diseases and pests, due to the increase in in food resources for these pests (Rusch et al., 2016) resulting from the significant expansion of cultivated cocoa farms, emerged. Varied local knowledge relative to the pedo-climatic context has led to original solutions, based on agroforestry (naturally-assisted regeneration and nursery seedling production) and the application of organic inputs (biopesticides and compost), which are currently being tested with volunteer cocoa farmers. We compare, analyze and question the different technical choices made between these three zones in relation to the history of cocoa farming and the age of CAFS.
This participatory design approach revealed clear advantages in terms of hybridizing knowledge, and thus enables participants to learn complementary knowledge (Tengö et al., 2014). It is therefore expected to be a driving force in the spontaneous implementation of experiments by farmers to move towards more resilient systems and promote the agroecological transition of cocoa value chains (Alif et al., 2024). However, this approach is still very time-consuming and costly compared with conventional training courses. We question current co-design methods and propose an original way of implementing technical advice with new methods and new tools that would allow upscaling and having an impact on a larger number of targeted stakeholders.
| Keywords | co-designing process; local and academic knowledge; cocoa agroforestry; bioinputs |
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