By Kofi Adu Domfeh
Ghana’s Cocoa Eco-Project has a
major outcome of increasing carbon sequestration by minimizing the emission of
harmful gases on cocoa farms into the atmosphere.
Carbon sequestration involves the
long term storage of carbon dioxide to mitigate climate change – it has been
proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases,
which are released by burning fossil fuels.
Under the Cocoa Eco-Project, SNV
Ghana is partnering the Kuapa Kokoo Farmers Union (KKFU) to create
environmental awareness among cocoa farmers, especially on issues of land
degradation and deforestation.
Farmers in selected production
districts are accessing support to plant trees and engage natural resource
management for efficient and sustainable cocoa production.
Helping the farmers to adapt to
climate change is a major concern, says Frank Okyere, Project Manager at KKFU.
“Even this year the rainfall pattern
is changing,” he observed. “Now for productivity to increase, we need rainfall
and the cocoa plant needs a micro-climate, including trees, to minimize the
pest infestation and everything”.
According to the World Bank, cocoa
farming is one of the dominant land use activities in Ghana with an estimated
cultivation area of over 1.6 million hectares.
Ghana is the second largest producer
of cocoa in the world, but productivity is low, compared with Ivory Coast.
Challenges in production are expected to be exacerbated by climate change.
Climate scientists at the
Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have
predicted the rising temperatures will lead to massive declines in cocoa
production cocoa-growing areas in West Africa by 2030.
This puts at risk an estimated
800,000 farm households in Ghana that depend on the cocoa sector for their
primary livelihood.
Increasing production demands
expansion of areas under cultivation, with the resultant effect of converting
forests to farming systems which leads to decline in carbon stocks.
The intervention of the Cocoa Eco
Project is to limit the encroachment of cocoa plantations onto forest lands and
conservation of biodiversity.
In the past two years, farmers have
been supplied with 34,000 shade tree seedlings in addition to 120,000 cocoa
seedlings.
Frank Okyere says the project is
beneficial to the environment and the economic livelihood of farmers.
“It will help them increase their
productivity, sell the trees because they are economic trees and in the wider
sense, protect our environment by absorbing the carbon dioxide so that
everybody will benefit,” he said.
A technical team at SNV Ghana is
working with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) on
climate mitigation activities in the country.
Charles Brefo-Nimo, Project Manager
of the Cocoa Eco-Project, says there are arrangements to identify climate
hot-spots in the country “so that they can use that to advise farmers as to
areas that they need to take note of”.
There are also programmes to limit
the level of degradation of forests in local communities, by using tools that
“help us to identify cocoa and forest, such that if people are encroaching into
a forest zone, that system will enable us to see and respond”.
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