Agroforestry is a system of food production in which crops are grown within forests. Unlike conventional agriculture (especially mainstream cocoa production), which often destroys natural habitat to make way for farmland, agroforestry instead encourages the growth and protection of forests to grow food.
Naturally, this comes with a whole host of environmental benefits. Agroforestry can restore forests on previously degraded land, providing habitat for wildlife, improving soil health, and combating global warming by absorbing carbon. Better still, when local people benefit economically from agroforestry, that can be an incentive for them to protect forests.
Cacao and Agroforestry
As a chocolate business with environmentalism at its core, we at Cacao are keen to support any measure that restores our precious natural habitats whilst producing sustainable food. Therefore, agroforestry plays a key part in our sourcing decisions.
As mentioned on our suppliers page, our Arenga palm sugar is purchased from the conservation organisation, Masarang, whose pioneering arenga palm agroforestry initiative has reforested vast swathes of degraded land in Indonesia. Much of the profits go directly to sugar tappers employed by Masarang, which incentivises them to protect and restore even more rainforest to grow sugar palms.
Recently, we also donated HK$20,000 to Masarang to plant one acre of agroforest in our name in their reforestation area at Temboan, North Sulawesi. Named ‘The Gomersall agroforestry plot’, it will form part of a larger effort to restore a barren grassland to a vibrant rainforest and will contain a wide variety of plants, including 400 Arenga palms and (appropriately) 400 cocoa trees.
While we do not currently plan to source from these particular cocoa trees for our chocolate, we are very proud to partner with and support Masarang’s vital efforts to restore our rainforests. We hope it makes your chocolate taste all the sweeter for knowing this.
A few questions about Agroforestry:
How much can agroforestry help combat the climate crisis?
Currently, agroforestry plots cover over 1 billion hectares of land worldwide. According to some estimates, these agroforestry plots store around 45 gigatons (45,000,000,000 metric tonnes) of carbon worldwide and can absorb an additional 0.73 gigatons per year over a ten year period. In other words, the amount of carbon agroforestry plots could remove each year equates to nearly three quarters of the mass of the entire human population.
As well as removing carbon from the atmosphere, agroforestry can also help to protect crops against the worst impacts of climate change. The shade provided by trees offers a cooling effect, and their roots can also extract water from deep underground, increasing the water content of soil closer to the surface and keeping it from drying out.
How does agroforestry improve soil health?
As well as increasing soil water content, agroforestry can also increase the nutrient levels of soil. Certain crops like beans have the ability to take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a form that can be stored in soil, in a process known as ‘nitrogen fixing’. Extra nutrients are also added when leaves fall from trees and decompose on the ground.
Moreover, tree roots bind soil in place and their leaves intercept rainfall, causing soil to be less exposed to rain and less easily washed away, which in turn also means that nutrients in it are not washed away too. By naturally increasing the nutrient load of soil, and therefore the productivity of crops, agroforestry systems also don’t need to rely on artificial fertilisers, which can have harmful environmental side effects, including on soil health.
Do farmers benefit from having to share their croplands with wildlife?
While there is certainly potential for competition between farmers and wildlife in agroforestry, some animals actually benefit the farmers by protecting their crops. For instance, high bird and bat populations keep crop-eating insect numbers in check, which leads to higher crop yields. One study even found that in coffee agroforestry plots, just one bird could save 23-65 pounds of coffee per hectare per year.
Better still, studies have found that have that, unlike in conventional agriculture, producing greater yields in agroforestry does not lead to decreases in biodiversity.
How can people benefit from agroforestry?
Agroforestry can benefit people in a number of ways. Having its own natural fertilisers and pest control systems means that farmers don’t have to spend so much money on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. It also improves food security through higher yields and greater climate resilience.
Additionally, agroforestry products are increasingly seen as being of higher quality and therefore higher value by both consumers and markets. As a result, produce grown using agroforestry can be sold at premiums, with some estimates placing the returns of agroforestry at 8 times higher than those of conventional agroforestry. Therefore, if local people can gain certification for their agroforestry products, they can gain access to a share of these returns and benefit massively for it. For instance, communities with contracts from Masarang, which helps them obtain certification for their Arenga palm sugar, have enjoyed a ten-fold increase in income and can afford the nicest housing and best education for their children.