- Satellite data and reports from the ground show how a rapid expansion of smallholder cacao farming in southeastern Liberia is causing “alarming” deforestation.
- Large numbers of migrant workers from Côte D’Ivoire have been invited into Liberia by community leaders looking set up cacao plantations.
- Liberia’s remote southeast is one of its most densely forested regions, and also one of its poorest.
- Cacao grown in these new plantations would likely run afoul of new EU regulations barring deforestation-linked commodities, which the bloc is considering delaying.
A rush to plant cacao in southeastern Liberia is destroying large tracts of rainforest. According to satellite data as well as interviews with local environmental advocates and government officials, the establishment of new plantations in regions that border Côte d’Ivoire is causing extensive deforestation and spurring conflicts over land.
While some of the plantations are old enough to have begun producing cacao already, satellite imagery collected by Global Forest Watch indicates that forest loss in Grand Gedeh county and other parts of southeastern Liberia spiked dramatically in 2025, suggesting the trend is accelerating.
Liberia’s remote southeast is one of its most densely forested regions, but also one of its poorest. Officials in Grand Gedeh said the rapid expansion of cacao farming there is being driven by local community leaders and political elites, who have invited migrant laborers from Côte d’Ivoire — often referred to as “Burkinabés” due to their origin in Burkina Faso — to help develop them.
“The town chief will say, ‘These are my people, I own this town, we have our forest and there is nothing doing with it. So we are giving it out to the Burkinabé people to give us money,’” Yei Neagor, an official with Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority, told Mongabay.
According to Liberian immigration authorities, nearly 50,000 workers have crossed the border into Grand Gedeh in recent years, a large figure for a county that had a population of just over 200,000 people as of 2022.
“The situation is alarming. They are really destroying the forest on a massive scale,” Neagor told Mongabay.
Information gathered during a Mongabay visit to Grand Gedeh in August support the findings of an Ivorian civil society group, which published a report last year saying it had documented 55 clearings of primary forest in nearby Maryland county. The group also said it had found evidence that some of the cacao being produced in Liberia was making its way into European corporate supply chains in Côte d’Ivoire.
While Liberia has promoted sustainable cacao production to access international markets in recent years, most of the farms in the southeast are being set up without the national government’s guidance and are in violation of Liberian environmental laws.
“Community members are giving out their land because of the financial benefit that [cacao] brings, but at the same time they lack the requisite knowledge on what it will cause for them in the future,” said Paul Kanneh, the founder of Liberia Forest Media Watch, which published a report based on research it carried out in Grand Gedeh this summer.
Liberia has historically been a minor player in global cacao markets compared to its West African neighbors Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. But both of those countries have lost significant forest cover to cacao production, and due to a combination of climatic and other factors harvests have been erratic there in recent years.
The price of cacao has soared since late 2022, going from $2.30 to $10.73 per kilogram at the start of 2025 before dropping to its current $7. Migrant laborers who’d traveled to Liberia from Côte d’Ivoire told Mongabay the perceived availability of land there was a major draw.
“Some of our friends who came to Liberia earlier called us and we saw messages on our phones,” said one. “They told us that the forest is open in Grand Gedeh, so that’s how we started coming to Liberia.”
Environmental advocates said that county and town leaders in Grand Gedeh are hoping to replicate the success of Côte d’Ivoire, which remains the world’s top producer of cacao despite its recent challenges.
“It started becoming a business in Grand Gedeh, with a lot of local elites starting to negotiate with customary communities, some of them using their influence and position to grab land,” said Wynston Benda-Henries, executive director of Liberia’s Save My Future Foundation.
Most of the migrant workers in southeastern Liberia have been involved in Côte d’Ivoire’s cacao industry for decades. The leaders of forest communities generally offer them a 20-to-300-hectare (50-to-740-acre) patch of land to set up a plantation, along with a deal to share its profits.
“The Burkinabés come in with an arrangement that we’ll supply you with the seedlings, we’ll do the plantation, manage the farm, and then carry the beans for sale, and you give us 40% of the proceeds while you take 60%,” Benda-Henries said.
But the prospect of a big payoff is exacerbating conflicts over land, as borders and boundaries between towns are often not formally demarcated.
“There have been cases of family members in land disputes,” said Uriah Zokruah, Grand Gedeh’s deputy police commander. “The majority of these lands that are having problems have no titled deeds or the ownership is in dispute.”
In some cases, cacao plantations have also been illegally cleared in areas demarcated for conservation, including Grebo-Krahn National Park, which is home to critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) and pygmy hippos (Choeropsis liberiensis). Earlier this year, a Liberian newspaper reported that a Forestry Development Authority ranger was kidnapped by traditional authorities for trying to prevent cacao farming inside the park.
The rapid expansion of cacao farming in Liberia’s forested southeast comes as the European Union weighs whether or not to again delay implementation of a new regulation on commodities linked to deforestation. Under the EU Deforestation Regulation — initially scheduled to take force at the end of 2024, then pushed back a year to the end of 2025 — cacao produced from new plantations in Grand Gedeh’s forests would almost certainly be barred from importation into the bloc.
“Cocoa production in southeastern Liberia is driving sky-high deforestation rates,” said Alexandra Benjamin, forest governance campaigner at FERN, a European environmental watchdog group. “Much of it is illegal, blighted by land rights violations and use of child labour. This creates serious reputational risks for any company buying this cocoa.”
James Giahyue contributed reporting from Liberia.
Banner image: Cacao illegally farmed inside Côte d’Ivoire’s Cavally Forest Reserve. Image courtesy of Mighty Earth.
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