Improving cocoa harvest can mitigate for crop damage by wildlife in a forest-agriculture matrix

Shade-grown cocoa has been suggested as a more carbon and biodiversity friendly land use around protected forests compared with slash-and-burn farmland, and may be particularly suitable for achieving livelihood, biodiversity and forest protection goals of REDD+ projects. However, loss of cocoa to wildlife perceived to come from forest protected areas can result in lower profits for local people, reduced livelihood benefits from development projects and negative perceptions of conservation leading to reduced conservation impacts. We collected and analysed data on cocoa pod numbers and damage by animals over 2 months of the cocoa growing season, coinciding with peak harvesting season, from 39 plots at 3 forest edge communities around Gola Rainforest National Park, Sierra Leone. We estimate that 20% of pods across the cocoa plantations studied were damaged by wildlife, though there was high spatial variation. Of damaged pods where the animal group responsible could be identified, 87.2% of the damage was by monkeys, 11.1% by rats or squirrels and 1.7% by chimpanzees. Binomial mixed modelling of the proportion of pods damaged by wildlife indicated that this was higher closer to settlements and where pod density was lower. This indicates that the species causing the most damage in this system are disturbance-tolerant generalists which are not dependent on the protected forest, that mitigation measures should be concentrated where damage is highest, particularly close to settlements, and that increasing cocoa yield in these communities could offset damage by wildlife and therefore still be a viable option for, for example, REDD+ projects, even where crop raiding is common.