Cashews and Cooperation: Land Use and Land Cover Change, Household Labor, and Local Perspectives in Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire

Satellite-based observations have revealed increases in agricultural land use across the country of Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. In the north, agricultural land use has been characterized by subsistence agriculture and cash cropping. Within the past thirty years, Côte d’Ivoire has become one of the world’s top cashew nut producers. The cashew economy is based on the savanna farming systems of rural households. Families continue to farm subsistence agriculture while also relying on cash crops, like cotton and cashews. This raises questions about how households can diversify their livelihoods to accommodate cashew production. This study presents results from the northwestern region of Côte d’Ivoire based on ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of spatial data. This study demonstrates that satellite-derived observations can be analyzed at various scales to reveal different patterns of agricultural land use. It also relies on ethnographic fieldwork and household surveys to describe how households allocate labor to farm cashew orchards. Specifically, it shows that household surveys provide additional depth to spatial data by describing the various labor formations on which households rely to achieve diversification in the adoption of cashew farming. Finally, this study presents results on participatory mapping and demonstrates that transect walks are a useful methodology to understand community-level landscapes.