No Cocoa Without Deforestation? A Field‐Type Analysis of Forest Frontiers in West Africa

This paper analyses the interrelations of production systems, class relations and deforestation in a smallholder forest frontier. Using the concept of field types, we provide a plot‐level analysis of deforestation processes in West Africa, where smallholders convert forest into cocoa farms. Field types are types of plots characterised by farming practices, specific development paths and specific regulating social relations. Based on 8 months of fieldwork in two case study villages in Ghana and Nigeria, we link the cocoa field type to the overall land‐use regime: field‐type–specific tenure relations and farming practices lower the barriers to planting cocoa on previously forested land. Farmers continuously expand their cocoa farms by reinvesting proceeds from matured cocoa trees. Thus, the cocoa field type facilitates widespread social mobility in which even labourers and marginal farmers accumulate trees over time. These mechanisms perpetuate the forest frontier land‐use regime as long as forest land remains available.