The vanishing forests on Liberia’s cocoa frontier

(GRAND GEDEH, Liberia) – Off in the woods beyond the ekki trees, a sharp crack cuts through the buzzing of insects.

“It’s a tree falling,” says George Bowey, a baby-faced community eco-guard who works here in the proposed Kwa National Park, a thick tropical rainforest in southeastern Liberia.

There are different ways to grow cacao. In one method, saplings are intercropped with other tree species so they form a diverse ecosystem. Or there’s another method, where plantation land is cleared by pouring gasoline on the base of native trees and setting their roots on fire so they wither and die.

This is the method that migrant cacao workers from nearby Côte d’Ivoire have brought into Kwa.

The sound of more trees falling echoes in the distance as Bowey picks his way through the bush. The other eco-guards and forest rangers here at Kwa call him “Gentle George.” With his upbeat personality, it’s not hard to see why.

He bounds up a damp hillside, listing off some of the species found inside Kwa.

“We got western chimpanzees, forest elephants, pygmy hippos, giant pangolins, white- and black-belly pangolins, we got a lot of animals in here, like leopards, golden cats, we got Diana monkeys, western black and white colobus, we got three types of crocodiles,” he says.

Eventually he reaches his destination. The cool overgrowth suddenly gives way to a blast of heat and raw sunlight. In front is a wide clearing, full of dry and leafless trees that stretch up toward the sky. Others rot on the ground like the skeletal fingers of a giant’s corpse. The waist-high saplings that poke out from the grasses next to them announce what this is.

It’s a massive cacao plantation. Around 250 acres in all, Bowey says, or about 100 hectares.

Kwa isn’t formally a national park yet, but it’s in the process of becoming one, and in the meantime commercial agriculture is prohibited inside its 1,720 square kilometers (664 square miles). It’s one of the few protected habitats for chimpanzees and other wildlife in southeastern Liberia, and forest rangers patrol it regularly along with the help of eco-guards like Bowey who work for the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation.

“At the end of 2023, we started seeing cocoa going closer to the park, but to enter the park it was last year,” Bowey says.

Much of the land around Kwa has already been cleared for cacao by people who live nearby. Now plantations like this are creeping inside its boundaries.

“They’ve given all the forest to Burkinabés, but some people still want to get access to more forests,” Bowey says. “In the name of getting money they’ve decided to get into the park.”

The two-hour walk back to the ranger camp weaves past other new plantations, which Bowey marks with a portable GPS tracker. There’s still a canopy over some of them, for now, but the burns on the trees confirm that they’re dying.

Bowey says he used to see chimpanzees and forest elephant tracks here. Since the plantations sprung up they’ve fled, moving deeper into the recesses of Kwa.

He grew up in one of the communities near here, and he knows some of the people sending workers inside the forest. When he visits to warn them against it, they tell him they need to make money. He understands where they’re coming from.

“I really don’t have sympathy for them,” he says, glaring at a fallen tree. “It should be understood for my community people, those of us who are around the landscape, that we should not be bringing people in here.”

The Upper Guinean Forest was once a vast belt of jungle and deep woods that covered nearly 400,000 km2 (154,000 mi2) from Sierra Leone to Togo. This immense rainforest sustained kingdoms, fueled trade, and harbored endemic wildlife.

Over the last century and a half, most of it has vanished. French and British colonial enterprises logged the forest ruthlessly, and after independence countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana built enormous cocoa industries by destroying much of what remained. (Throughout this story, we use “cacao” for the tree and raw beans, and “cocoa” for the commodity and processed products.)

More than half of what survived this period is here in Liberia. On a map of primary forest cover, the country’s remote southeast still appears as an island of green surrounded by a sea of commercial agriculture and deforestation in West Africa.