Liberia’s cocoa rush felled more forest in Grand Gedeh last year than any county in the country’s satellite record, which runs back to 2002, clearing a landscape that Global Forest Watch counted as 99 per cent natural forest in 2020. That is according to a Mongabay field investigation published on Friday, which followed up on loss alerts in the plantations, ranger patrols, and buying stations of a county bordering Côte d’Ivoire.
Written by Ashoka Mukpo alongside Monrovia-based journalist James Giahyue, the investigation shows the loss quickening, with the county shedding primary forest more than four times the size of Manhattan across 2024 and 2025 alone, part of the 64,000 hectares of humid primary forest lost since 2015.
Plantations are now pushing into the proposed Kwa National Park, where commercial farming is banned across 1,720 square kilometres, and eco-guards patrolling for the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation have recorded a single illegal clearing measuring 100 hectares.
“We sit and fold our hands and watch the forest going,” Yei Neagor, the Forestry Development Authority officer running the agency’s Grand Gedeh station, said of a mandate that stops at the boundary of registered community forests. Her office fields a dozen rangers across a county the size of Lebanon, holds standing orders not to destroy mature cacao trees planted inside protected areas, and estimates 70 per cent of the forest in the Gbarzon district is already gone.
Migrant labour is doing the planting, with an unpublished report by Liberia’s Refugee Repatriation and Resettlement Commission putting the workforce in Grand Gedeh at 80,000, nearly one in three people in a county of just over 200,000. Most crossed from Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s biggest cocoa exporter, where exhausted plantations and vanished forests sent experienced Burkinabé workers over the border after the global cocoa price quadrupled in 2024.
Handshake terms govern the trade, with the town of Zleh committing 5,700 of its 6,900 hectares of customary forest to cacao without a written contract. One pre-dawn FDA raid near Boundary town arrested 21 workers, and the hosts who paid US$1,500 to free them had struck deals the community forest’s own rules prohibit.
“In the name of getting money, they’ve decided to get into the park,” George Bowey, a Wild Chimpanzee Foundation eco-guard who grew up beside Kwa, said of neighbours now sending workers past its boundary. Kwa is contested in Monrovia as well, with a probe ordered by President Joseph Boakai finding that cocoa farmers falsified signatures on an appeal letter demanding that Kwa’s boundary be moved back 10 kilometres, in a park the Liberian Observer reports has already shrunk to 172,200 hectares from 236,246.
Europe is where the beans go, with the bloc importing more than 17,000 tonnes of Liberian cocoa in 2024, a 30 per cent increase in two years that makes the EU the country’s biggest cocoa customer. Every shipment falls under the twice-delayed EU Deforestation Regulation, which comes into effect on 30 December and starts blocking goods, including cocoa and timber, grown on land cleared after 31 December 2020.
“Liberia is at a very early stage on all these fronts,” Owen Gibbons, senior manager for public affairs and advocacy at the Rainforest Alliance, said of a country with no national tracing system to match those of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, which spent years building. Acting Agriculture Minister David Akoi called the law a “new colonial rule” at a Senate hearing in May, while LACRA, the country’s commodity regulator, has warned farmers risk losing the European market before any tracing system reaches them.
“Clear-cutting forests is something that breaches the law,” Delara Burkhardt, the German member of the European Parliament pushing to end the regulation’s delays, said, conceding the frustration of Liberian farmers while insisting the rules must hold.
It comes as the European Parliament voted last month to scrap the EU’s 2013 timber pact with Monrovia, closing the FLEGT oversight system built to police illegal harvesting, just as a commodity outside the timber rules opened a new deforestation front. The forest now falling to cacao belongs to a sector the World Bank is backing to shift from log exports into domestic milling, an industry of 40,000 workers in a country already losing 30,000 hectares of forest a year.
Down the chain, trader Lincoln Daslah takes a 30 per cent cut of every load he sells to Monrovia, has never heard of the law that could shut his market, and estimates that 85 per cent of the forest is gone on the land he owns. The beans drying outside his storehouse were almost certainly grown on ground cleared after the 2020 cutoff, and from 30 December, that date decides whether Liberia’s newest export ever reaches its biggest customer.
- WoodCentral
