SOUBRÉ, Côte d’Ivoire — “Dry periods never used to last this long before,” says Célestin Oura, a farmer in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire. “The dry season used to last a month at most. Now, it lasts three to four months, and the plantations are really suffering as a result.” Declining yields and rising production costs are forcing many Ivorian farmers in this cacao-growing region surrounding the town of Soubré to abandon the crop. “Every year, cacao plants die. We try to apply fertilizer to those that are still hanging in there, but production is still low. Expenses are so high that we can’t make a profit anymore,” Oura says. A guided tour of the fields around Kossou, the village where Oura farms, reveals destroyed cacao plantations, some abandoned and overgrown. According to Oura, some farmers here are turning to other crops, such as rubber or oil palm, which are considered more resistant to unpredictable weather. The prolonged dry season stretching into 2025 is exacerbating the effects of flooding that occurred here in late 2024. Parfait Koffi Yao is regional coordinator of the Ivorian League of Professional Agricultural Organizations (Lipopa), and chair of the board of directors of Scopoa, the farmers’ cooperative in the village of Ottawa, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Soubré. Yao says the region experienced particularly heavy rains in 2024. Obrouayo, another village near Soubré, paid a heavy price. Twenty farmers here saw their plantations submerged by the waters of the Sassandra River. “These farmers had nothing to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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