The Reproduction of the Cocoa Industry and Biodiversity in Southern Bahia, Brazil

Cocoa is a commodity. Holding quality constant, the world market is mostly indifferent to whether cocoa is from Brazil or Malaysia, whether it is grown on monocrop plantations or in backyard gardens, whether it eliminates or perpetuates poverty, or whether it sustains or destroys the last pockets of tropical biodiversity. Consumers are guided by daily price movements which do not incorporate information about the medium-term, "plate-tectonic" factors which constitute the social and environmental basis of the production system. Economists increasingly recognize that if markets permitted consumers to choose between production systems with or without positive environmental and social externalities, prices of products like cocoa would be higher to permit the incorporation of these equally economic benefits. There are two key problems complicating the search for mechanisms permitting these choices: since global market problems require global policy fixes, negotiation among national governments is required to provide for transfer payments and, it is unclear how a willingness to pay higher commodity prices can be used to induce not more production, but the various specific environmental or social side-effects which consumer nations seek. This disjunction between the global commodity market and the heterogeneous types of externalities which global policy is asked to redress is the model for three disjunctions I will discuss with respect to cocoa production in Bahia, Brazil. A disjunction, in this paper, is a gap between the nature of the problem and the nature of the tools available to address the problem. Three disjunctions will be addressed here. The first distinguishes between the problem of critical forest fragments and the tools influencing the way cocoa is produced. The second is between the economy of the traditional extensive cocoa plantations, and the socio-cultural base of the institutions that service this economy. The third disjunction is on the time dimension, between the immediate need to implement solutions and the long-term nature of the fundamental reforms necessary to sustain these solutions.

Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	41432 Alger, K. autor/a
Format:	Texto biblioteca
Language:	eng
Published:	Washington DC (EUA): Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, 2000
Subjects:	THEOBROMA CACAO, PROPAGACION VEGETATIVA, REPRODUCCION, BIODIVERSIDAD, AGROFORESTERIA, PLANTAS DE SOMBRA,
Online Access:	https://nationalzoo.si.edu/scbi/migratorybirds/research/cacao/alger.cfm
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