Environmental change and normalization of cash crop systems in Africa: preventing agrarian change in West Africa cocoa

ABSTRACT

In recent years, environmental and demographic crises have often been associated with increasing hunger and poverty in agrarian societies. The potential of such crisis to play a positive role in the evolution of agriculture and agricultural societies has been overlooked. Environmental crises such as deforestation for example (in a production where forestland is a production factor) are points of resource alteration that require corresponding alterations in farming systems. Normalization occurs when farmers are induced to defy such signals indicating the need to diversify and instead choose to continue along their existing path regardless of the changing resource endowment. In the absence is replacement of the vital production factor such continuity has to be paid for.

KEYWORDS:

• Normalization
• deforestation
• agrarian change
• cocoa
• Ghana
• Côte d’Ivoire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although there are different channels for crisis in farming communities, especially among peasants cultivating for exportation, such as economic crisis (factor and output prices, demand, etc.), political crisis, demographic crisis and environmental crisis (climate change, soil degradation, pest outbreaks, etc.), theoretical studies have generally focused on a single driver of change. Thomas Malthus, for example, used population increase as the crisis point to predict societal change (doom), while Ester Boserup used the same crisis point to predict technological and developmental change in agrarian technology and peasant societies (Boserup 1965; Brookfield 1991). Harold Brookfield rightly argued that both writers could well have used environmental degradation/change to plot their doom/innovation outcome. In a simple model of crisis and change in agrarian societies, crisis leads to regressive or progressive changes; either way, change is inevitable.