‘Cocoa fever’ in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh is wiping out native forests

Grand Gedeh county in Liberia, which was 99% natural forest as recently as 2020, is losing tree cover faster than any other Liberian county on record, according to Global Forest Watch data cited by Mongabay.

The cause is cacao: Ivorian farmworkers, whose home country’s own aging plantations have exhausted the soil, are crossing the border into Liberia where landowners offer land shares in exchange for cocoa income. Around the town of Zleh, roughly 82% of communal forest land has already been converted, and a Forestry Development Authority official put forest loss in the surrounding district at about 70%.

Commercial cacao farming is technically banned inside most FDA-registered community forests, and Liberian law regulates how such land can be leased — rules a community forest chair says simply aren’t followed. Residents of one registered forest town, Boundary, recruited migrant workers anyway, using the proceeds to repair roofs and send children abroad to school, while a 2025 investigation found local officials involved in an illegal land deal with an Ivorian cocoa entrepreneur.

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