How cocoa is threatening conservation in Nigeria
As cocoa prices reach an astronomical high, farmers are more than ever destroying forests to expand production, at the decimating expense of conservation efforts.
By: Olatunji Olaigbe
If, like me, you try to get to the Drill Exhibition Ranch in Calabar using Google Maps, you’ll end up two streets away at the end of a faintly tarred road. Drill Ranch is past another pothole-ridden road on your left, into another tarred road, and into an obscure corner on your left that leads down a narrow alley.
There, on your left, you’ll find the Ranch with its rusted gate and noisy animals. There, you’ll begin this pursuit to understand what cocoa has caused conservation in Cross River, which will require you to imagine the founders of Drill Ranch, 37 years ago in Cross River, burying wooden stakes to build camps deep in the Afi forest, eight hours and 641 kilometers of muddy, accident-prone, terrible roads away from the nearest city.
When I first met the couple, Peter Jenkins, tall and leaning, received me at their gate with an accent that was both American and Nigerian. “So you’re the one trying to report a story, ehh?”
The day before, I had travelled 24hrs by road from Southwest Nigeria to Calabar, the Capital of Cross River — which holds an estimated 50% of all remaining forests in Nigeria, home to one of the world’s top 25 biodiversity hotspot; and where 35 years ago, Peter Jenkins and Liza Gadsby settled to build Pandrillus, a project to save the last remaining species of the Mandrill monkey — the most popular individual of this monkey specie, ironically, is a fictional character; Rafiki, the prophet monkey in the Lion King Series.
Liza Gadsby and her partner, Peter Jenkins, had first arrived in Nigeria in 1988 with a ten-day transit visa and had planned to see the gorillas for a few days before continuing their exploration across Africa.
37 years later, they are still there. The couple played key roles in early conservation efforts in Nigeria, including advocating for and setting up the Cross River National Park and the Afi Wildlife Sanctuary, arguably among the top three most important conservation efforts in modern Nigeria.
In 2001, when the then-President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, visited the ranch, he had planted an ebony tree that today, 24 years later, is just a couple of feet tall.
All that work, Liza and Peter tell me, along with tens of conservation projects in Cross River, is being threatened by cocoa production, which has reached a new high as farmers in the region try to produce more and take advantage of record commodity prices.
That evening, Liza took us on a short tour to see the animals on the ranch, the most prominent being the Mandrill monkey, the endangered Old World monkey that the ranch is named after.
Dominant male Kebi smiling with some adult females in Group 1. Kebi came to the project as a severely malnourished orphan from a village in the Oban Hills in 1991. He became one of the most successful dominant males in the project’s history, and was a favorite of staff because of his gentle, calm disposition and skill in controling his group. Kebi died when the tree he was sleeping in crashed down during a storm in 2005, a year after relinquishing his position as dominant male. His many offspring are amongst the group to be released to the wild in 2008. (photo by Cyril Ruoso)
Agriculture is the world’s leading cause of deforestation, associated with roughly 90% of all deforestation in the world, and led mostly by livestock and cash crop farming.
“In Cross River, roughly 30% of human-led deforestation is caused by cocoa farming,” Sunday Ova, a project coordinator at the World Conservation Society, who handles agricultural interventions in cocoa-growing parts of the state, tells me.
Liza and Peter disagree. The couple believes cocoa is associated with as much as 80% of deforestation happening in the region. “First, it’s the loggers who go and cut down the trees (for sale), then the cocoa farmers go in and plant cocoa, and they say it’s been cocoa there all along,” Peter tells me.
To prevent further deforestation, the WCS introduced a project in agricultural zones to teach farmers organic and regenerative agriculture, focusing on cocoa and mango bush, which Sunday says is the leading cause of “anthropological interruption in conservation efforts. The women are entering protected areas to pluck bush mango while the men are cutting down trees to plant cocoa.”
In Oban, roughly 48 kilometers from Calabar, I met with Ojon Efa, 32, and Daniel Bassey, 57, both farmers under the WCS sustainable cocoa project.
The farmers have been taught how to prune cocoa for maximum production, produce organic manure, and have been supported with seedlings of high-production hybrids, among other things. “If the farmers have high production with their current farms, they won’t see a need to deforest other regions to plant their cocoa,” Sunday says.
Since the intervention, Ojon, the younger farmer, says he’s recorded at least a 50% increase in production as a result of the intervention.
The best part, he says, is that organic agriculture also drastically reduces their cost of production as they no longer have to buy pesticides, herbicides, and inorganic fertilizers – essential non-organic products whose increase in price has led to skyrocketing costs of production for the farmers.
At the end of the interview, when I asked Daniel what he’d want to do now with all the knowledge he has. “I want to increase my farm. I want to plant more (cocoa) trees and take care of my family.”
“Won’t planting more trees lead to cutting down forests?” I asked, “It is my land,” he responded firmly.
It is hard to tell what is cocoa from the forest, but there’s a giveaway: cocoa trees have a uniform, spiral canopy, which from the sky looks like order in a sea of chaotic forest structures.
Spiral structures are cocoa farms in protected forest zones in Oban, Cross River. There is also light brown to show the dirt roads and footpaths. A satellite overview of field visits in cocoa farms. Imagery source: Google Earth Pro. Generated by Mansir Muhammed.
Nearby, there’s another crop field spanning at least 3,000 hectares with a consistent spiral-shaped tree canopy of a cocoa plantation. There is no structure or order to the crop fields, and hardly any clear sign of demarcation between fields.
We headed back to Calabar in the evening to meet again with Peter and Liza, both of whom are staunch disbelievers in the concept of sustainable cocoa. Naturally, they latched onto this exchange with Daniel as a fundamental flaw in the concept of sustainable cocoa. “It’s a cash crop, you’re not going to eat cocoa. The only reason it’s planted is money,” Liza tells me, and in a capitalist world, money is never enough.
The expansion of cocoa is most visible in Boki, where the drill ranch main outpost is, nearly 250 kilometers away and a 10-hour drive from Calabar, and located 40 kilometers from the Nigeria-Cameroon border.
Before Boki, you get to Ikom, which is arguably the most urban of rural Cross River. On the road from Ikom to Boki, every house is sun-drying cocoa. Freshly cut cocoa starts coated with a white, sweet pulp, which quickly ferments to give a thick, pungent smell. As it dries, however, the pungency gives way to a sour floral aroma.
The air on the road to Boki is thick with variations between pungent and floral. Satellite towns like Ikom, which lie between the capital, Calabar, and rural areas, serve as gathering points for cocoa sellers. The farmer sells to the trader, who then sells to the exporter. The exporter loads up a container at the port and sends it to his buyers, big chocolate companies in Europe.
Cross River is arguably the second largest producer of cocoa in Nigeria, right after Ondo and often interchanges with Osun. The state churns out more than 65,000 metric tons of brown gold annually, which is valued at 845 billion naira ($550 million) on the ground. Nigeria is the fourth largest producer of cocoa in the world, producing some 340,000 metric tonnes of the commodity annually.
Since 2023, Cocoa prices have been rising globally, caused by climate change and fertilizer supply chain breakdowns, which have devastated production across West and Central Africa, which is collectively responsible for more than 60% of global production. Between January 2023 and 2025, prices by the International Cocoa Organization increased from just over $2,500 per metric ton to over $11,000.
In Ikom, as he maneuvers potholes, immigration checkpoints, and the speeding convoy of the Cross River Deputy Governor, our driver says cocoa has become the most important commodity in rural Cross River.
Many of his childhood friends who became cocoa farmers have risen to become some of the richest in their age group in the past two years. “One of my friend wey dey do the business, he don build house now, wey be say me sef i wan start farm,” he said — One of my friends that does the business has now built a house. I also want to start farming cocoa.
In Boki, cocoa farmers have hit it big. We met with Jerry Madede (name changed) in his farm located at the bottom of the Afi Wildlife Sanctuary. Jerry, who is also a forest guard and has been misnamed to protect his identity, has been farming since he was 12.
Until now, he has had to take odd jobs along with his farm to catch up financially. From the money he made in the last harvest, however, he’d bought a new bike, bought some land in the city, and is currently considering increasing his farm size and employing a labourer.
Now, however, at his farm, where just the night before, a storm had carried off what he estimates to be over 200kg of cocoa, which he’d harvested to come cut and ferment later, Jerry tries to convince me that planting cocoa is not deforestation. “We deforest, and then afforestate back with cocoa,” he says. “You know cocoa is also a tree.”
In Boki, it’s harder for the satellite to pick what is forest from cocoa. For this, Manisr used different satellite features to take features of the land cover apart. Using Landsat 5, 7, & 8 Surface Reflectance by NASA, along with the popular Hansen Global Forest Change, he created a consistent visual history of the Cross River National Park through the past two decades and confirmed not just that the forest is degrading, but exactly how.
The table below shows reduced forest size over the years.
Catastrophic Collapse of the Core Forest
The map below, like the Stable Forest column of the table above, shows, after a peak in 2010 (likely a very green, clear satellite year), the core, healthy forest collapses. It drops from 101 sq km to just 12 sq km by 2023. This is an 88% loss of the stable forest area in just over a decade.
Gif: Land that was a dense forest in 2000 but is now less dense. This represents selective logging, early clearing, or conversion to farmland/ illustrated by Mansir Muhammed. Data: Landsat and Hansen Global Forest Change.
The most dramatic event in our data occurs between 2010 and 2015. The Deforested Land explodes, increasing tenfold from 23 sq km to 244 sq km. This five-year period represents a massive acceleration in land clearing and is the central finding of our remote sensing analysis.
Finally and most importantly, data strongly support our field report, confirming the research premise. Notice how the Degraded Forest is high in the early years, but then drops significantly after 2010. This land isn’t staying degraded, but is being converted to tree crop plantations.
The data shows a protected forest in critical collapse. The period after 2010, and especially between 2010 and 2015, marked a catastrophic acceleration of deforestation, where land was rapidly converted from dense forest, through a temporary degraded state, into permanently cleared land.
By 2023, the vast majority of the original 2000-era forest within the analyzed area had been either degraded or destroyed.
This shift to monoculture—replacing diverse ecosystems with a single crop like cocoa—poses serious threats to biodiversity, soil health, and long-term agricultural sustainability.
When original forests are cleared to make way for cocoa plantations, the delicate balance of the ecosystem is disrupted. Countless species of plants, animals, and microorganisms, many of which are endemic and cannot survive outside their natural habitat, are lost. The removal of these forests over the long term also leads to habitat loss, endangering wildlife and reducing genetic diversity.
Moreover, monoculture farming depletes soil nutrients over time, as the same crop repeatedly draws the same resources from the ground. This often forces farmers to rely heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can further degrade the environment, pollute water sources, and harm human health. When the land can no longer grow cocoa, farmers in rural Cross River are known to switch from cocoa to cassava, and then destroy another forest patch to plant cocoa.
Jerry’s argument is an easy excuse that overlooks the fact that cocoa plantations lack the ecological complexity of natural forests. The loss of original forests disrupts water cycles, increases soil erosion, contributes to climate change by releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, and, perhaps most importantly, endangers wildlife.
Drill Ranch project sites are open to the public free of charge, 365 days a year.
Asuquo, the oldest worker at Drill Ranch, has been working at Pandrillus for nearly two decades. We spoke as he fed a supergroup of nearly 200 Drill monkeys, catalogued officially as group 2.
More than anyone else, Asuquo has watched farms sprout from what should be protected forest areas, and the exponential increase in violent interactions between humans and protected animals.
The monkeys, who leave the enclosure to forage every morning, now meet more people on the road and are likely to forage into farms. “People are expanding their farms. There’s a lot of encroachment happening,” he said. “Especially right now, the price of cocoa is rising, so people are expanding their farms.”
“People come here complaining that the animals have entered their farm and destroyed things,” Asuquo says. “But the animals have always foraged that route, and the farms were not there ten years ago. So they assume it’s their land.”
This particular intersection is a key threat to the work at Drill Ranch. In the 1990s, as Liza explains, the goal of the drill conservation project was to create a captive breeding population, which many experts thought was impossible. Captive drill populations at that point did not breed.
With breeding successful, a plan was set to release populations back in the wild and restore the population in areas where the Mandrill had been hunted to extinction, while of course, having backup populations in captivity. “We lobbied with the government to upgrade one-quarter of the Afi River Forest Reserve into the Afi wildlife sanctuary — the plan being that we’d have a protected area to release captive populations back into the wild once the breeding was successful,” Liza tells me, her words punctuated by the screeching of baby monkeys.
In 2015, Pandrllus was set to release its first population back into the wild. Liza wanted to do everything by the book. She’d helped review the IUCN checklist for reintroduction and was keen on ticking every box. “We couldn’t meet some of them, so we decided to postpone,” Liza said.
They postponed the release to 2025. “Since then, we have lost a huge amount of forest in Afi and the surrounding buffer zone. We’ve also lost the government’s commitment… I mean, the laws are perfect, but laws need enforcement, and that’s not something we have in Nigeria.”
Now, ten years later, when the release is meant to happen, Liza has never been surer that the animals cannot survive in what used to be their original habitat.
Liza and Peter believe the people do not understand what is being lost at the risk of money being made, but communities I spoke with, who have been recipients of decades of sensitization programs from Pandrillus and conservation projects in the state, often brought up broader economic delinquency as a reason.
Many also felt they had a right to the forest, which was passed to them by their ancestors. In fact, they feel conservation projects have taken up their land, which is their key form of sustenance. “If we can’t make money from the land, what will we make money from?” one of the villagers in Boki asks me.
No one is as torn as Sayina Arriman, a cocoa farmer, merchant, and former vice president of the World Cocoa Producers Organization, headquartered in the Ivory Coast. At some point, Sayina says he was the third largest exporter of cocoa in Nigeria and was pivotal to Nigeria’s cocoa market’s shift to the free market.
“The youngest farmers (of cocoa in Nigeria) are here in Cross River, the youngest trees are found here, the youngest plantations are found here,” Sayina said with pride. Young plantations mean that forests have been cleared to plant new cocoa.
“We need to protect the environment, but people also need to make money. Cocoa is an important source of income for many people,” he replied.
Sayina, who now focuses more on planting food crops and trading cocoa, has dedicated the past five years of his life, like WCS, to teaching farmers how to produce more cocoa with fewer trees. Like the WCS, he also insists that more production will disincentivize farmers from cutting down more forest.
In the past, Sayina has also partnered with Peter and Liza to implement conservation sensitization projects among farmers and indigenes.
“See that hill over there, we used to be able to see chimpanzees swinging from trees while growing, now it’s all houses. We used to watch them from where I stand.” Yet, in the next sentence, he is talking about how cocoa brought hundreds of farmers in the region out of poverty.
To understand the economic and sociopolitical drag of cocoa in Africa — the audacity of it, you have to go back 200 years to São Tomé, when cocoa was first brought to São Tomé. From there, through colonial policies that encouraged the growth of cash crops over food crops, cocoa spread exponentially across the continent.
In the past, Nigeria was the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Today, it’s the third. West Africa produces so much cocoa that it is considered a staple of the region’s identity. Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire are considered to be countries built on cocoa.
According to Peter, cocoa is directly responsible for more than 80% of all the deforestation happening in protected areas in Cross River. Between 2001 and 2023, Cross River has lost more than 134,000 square kilometers of tree cover — nearly the size of 250,000 football fields — per data from Global Forest Watch. Cross River is considered the state with the highest rate of deforestation in Nigeria.
“From the sky, you can’t tell it’s deforestation because they’ve planted cocoa, a tree. On the ground, you start seeing holes,” said Peter, who was once head of the Cross River forest commission and says he’s walked every walkable path of forest in the state.
Back at the ranch, Asuquo had told me that it was not until you take a gun and shoot the animal that you’re committing violence.
“When we first started, the biggest threat to the animals was the hunting and dwindling population. Now, it’s habitat destruction,” Liza said.
Young Liza and Peter with David Iferi of Edondon village, donor of drill Richard Iferi, in 1992. (photo by Tunde Morakinyo)
Peter is adamant that all of this is a result of greed. On a large paper map, he points to too many patches of forests, “this used to be forest, now it’s all cocoa. This too. This too,” he said.
Liza is the most defeated. Before we headed to Boki, both Liza and Peter refused to grant any interviews until we’d gone to the forests and seen “what was happening with our own eyes.” Now, Liza, burning out a cigarette, admits that more than anything, she feels helpless.
“Maybe we should have done the release quicker, ten, twenty years ago, we shouldn’t have been so stuck on being by the book,” I asked. If they had, would that have stopped the deforestation? Wouldn’t the population be in more peril now?
“At least I would know that I did my best. Maybe I would be more focused on protecting the environment and not caring for animals who should have been released back to their homes.”
To understand what is slowly being lost, Liza tells me, you have to picture her through all the work, all the good and bad days. The journey to Boki from Calabar takes ten hours, how they camped and slept at the ranch before it was place anyone could sleep in; you have to see the dreams of each people who donated a captured animal to the ranch, who volunteered, you have to see the dreams of Olusegun Obasanjo when he decided to walk without security into the ranch’s ape enclosure during his visit in 2001; you have to see the dreams of everyone who has donated a penny to the project, who felt like something here is worth saving.
“We don’t eat cocoa. All of this is being lost to a crop we don’t even eat,” Liza said, with the resignation of anyone whose life’s work was slipping away to the pull of greed, socioeconomic dysfunction, and colonial trade legacies.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What more can we do?”
It was now evening. I couldn’t tell if she was teary-eyed or the sunset was exaggerating the glaze in her eyes.
Mansir Muhammed contributed satellite analysis for this story.
This story was reported with support from the Pulitzer Center.
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