Why are forests vanishing in southeastern Liberia?

GRAND GEDEH, Liberia – In the past century, most of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest has been lost to commercial agriculture, infrastructure development and logging.More than half of what’s left is in Liberia, and the remaining rainforest now faces a threat that’s already driven much of the region’s deforestation: cacao production.In the past few years, the rush to plant cacao has been on in southeastern Liberia, destroying vast tracts of forest. After reviewing satellite data that shows massive forest loss, Mongabay visited the region to investigate what’s driving the industry’s rapid expansion and who is profiting from it.In this episode of Chasing Deforestation, we travel deep into Liberia’s rainforests to speak with migrant cocoa workers, forest rangers and community landowners. Join us in our journey from a protected chimpanzee habitat to the European Parliament, as we examine whether these forests will survive the world’s appetite for chocolate.Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in touch with us here!Banner image: A collage featuring Ashoka Mukpo, a Mongabay reporter, and a cocoa bean. TranscriptNotice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.1 Grand Gedeh is crazy for cocoa. I mean, you find it with common people in the community. You find it with people in government. You find it with people outside of the county. They are call in it the brown gold. And everybody is in search of it. Here we met George. He works with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. He’s trying to protect this part of the forest from illegal cocoa farming. There’s a very unique landscape where some species that you don’t find vin teh entire world.. he Western chimpanzee, we have elephants, we have hippo. We have some tigers. Are we going to see chimpanzees? It will be difficult right now in the name of cocoa farming. People are destroying the forest. What are you guys here doing to try to address this issue? We are patrolling on a daily basis to see anyone we find within this park. We pull them out of the park, and we sensitize and let them understand that this place is a proposed national park, a reserve. We are about to enter one of the biggest cocoa farms within the proposed national park.. This is one of them. This, this. This farm is in. Greer wants us to try. Wow. This is much bigger than I thought it was going to be. This is huge. It’s very big. It would be around 100 hectares. So these cocoa trees, those ones down there, right? Yeah, these are the Cocos trees. And they’re very small, so it seems like this is new..Yeah, it’s new, new.. How old is this? People have been coming to this place recently, like a year ago. Right now, it feels a little bit like it’s cocoa versus the forest in Liberia. And I think cocoa was winning, right? Yeah, yeah. Cocoa is winning the battle. And very fast. It seems that we found some workers…. they are running . These are some of the Burkinabe. We’re here to do cocoa production, and it’s been caught on an illegal farm. I think that once a week is the forest will go up. Reports of Burkina Faso work. Like who? Whose job is to inform this kids that it’s illegal to be here. You know this is host job. Yes, this host job. Well, he wouldn’t do it, you know, and most of the times they are more interested in the conservation rather than all of it. You got to just feel. I mean, it’s just natural to feel so much sympathy for this kid, you know? I mean, that’s like, you know, first of all, he should be in school. I don’t I don’t I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But if the community knows that these guys are being exposed to this kind of risk of arrest, why do they keep sending them here to the forest to work? The immigrants began to pull in. I would say a Cocoa rush started taking place in the count. They just came here for some economic opportunities. And it’s really like a lot of the Liberian communities are inviting them and bringing them in. Yeah, right. Many of them are not bad they came to look for greener pastures. What is our local people, our citizne they want our causing the trouble for us because our money they will for it carry the people in it for us is for protecting. It is not legal. I agree with them. That is not illegal. But yes, but I live on the land now. If you say I shouldn’t do, what do you expect me to do? How do you say to live? Five years ago there was no cocoa. And how did that change things for us? Yeah, it transformed our lives. Before you could not see houses, you see huts, but for now the life of the town has been transform. It’s not just villagers like this. Big landowners are also farming cocoa. Local officials have been implicated in corruption around some deals. Cocoa is becoming big business. And Grand Gina from the forest here. Local distributors feed it into global supply chains. But we are off to a Zleh city hat’s, hat is where the brokers association is situated. And we a re going to talk to a guys name Lincoln, If you think the farmers make money, check the brokers they really win money they run the show. At every step in the supply chain, the coca rises in price and so do profits. The business now is this increasing on a daily basis because of the cocoa work. So it seems like, you know, even though it’s maybe bad for the forest here, there’s a lot of people that feel like their life is improving. My life is improving, you see the business that I am making now are from cocoa. Do you ever think about where all this cocoa is going? We are very curious to know where our cooca is going. So you guys don’t really even know who’s buying the cocoa, which company it goes to when the prices get sent us. Absolutely, we do not know which company it is—whether a European or an American company,. We don’t know. You’re just blind. You’re in this year’s. We’re just here because we were living, you know, in poverty. And we’re seeing the cocoa bringing little money to us. So where does all this cocoa go? Distributors like Lincoln sell most of it to exporters in the capital. From there, more than half of it is shipped to Europe, which is Liberia’s top customer. But EU legislators have passed a law meant to keep these deforestation linked products out of European markets, which could derail the Liberian trade. I met with one of them in the European Parliament. The European Deforestation Regulation aims to take up European responsibility for the destruction of forests. What we are offering by setting standards for the European market is actually possibilities to have a more sustainable agricultural production in the original countries and to make sure that we stop this one sided exploitation of resources and actually giving a more sustainable trade relation. The EU supporters say it will help keep forests like the ones in grand good standing. It should have gone into force in 2024 instead after a backlash in Europe, it’s been delayed twice. So one has to be very clear that the delays, they are not the technical issues. It’s not about implementation. It’s a political decision. We we see a lot of pressure, especially also coming from within the EU, from some industries. Much of the cocoa we saw in Grand GT was illegally farmed under the EU ADR. It would likely be blocked in the world’s biggest market for it. I can understand that this might exclude Liberian farmers from the market, but still, it could be an excuse for other farmers in countries to actually don’t work on sustainable practices. We have to make sure that sustainable practices are supported, and cutting forests is something that breaches the law. It’s clear that there’s no simple way to stop deforestation in southeastern Liberia. But for now, what’s happening there is an old familiar story. Much of the rainforest in Cote d’Ivoire has been lost to the cocoa industry. Unless something changes, Liberia looks like it could be next.