TRACING FUTURES TO FORESTS: How the 2016–2017 Cocoa Price Crash Reshaped Land-Use and Vegetation Stress in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana

More than 60 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced by smallholder farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, yet the prices those farmers receive are tied to global futures benchmarks set far from the farm. Although both countries use state-administered pricing systems to announce a fixed producer price each season, these systems remain constrained by volatile international markets. The 2016–2017 cocoa price crash—when world prices fell by roughly 35 percent—provides a clear test of how a shared market shock moves through different governance structures. In Ghana, the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) buffered the shock by taking on public debt to maintain announced producer prices. In Côte d’Ivoire, exporter defaults contributed to an unprecedented mid-season cut in the producer price, transmitting the shock more directly to farmers. This thesis examines whether the 2016–2017 crash produced detectable ecological change in cocoa-growing landscapes, and whether the dominant response differed between the two countries. Using Google Earth Engine and satellite data from 2014 to 2020 across six cocoa-producing regions per country, I implement two complementary analyses. Part A measures frontier disturbance by mapping burned area within a defined cocoa–forest frontier belt. Part B measures within-mosaic stress by tracking quarterly median EVI, NDMI, and AET within cocoa pixels relative to a non-cocoa native forest baseline, allowing cocoa-specific stress to be distinguished from shared seasonal variation. The results reveal a clear governance-mediated divergence. In Ghana, where the shock was institutionally buffered, cocoa canopy vigor, moisture, and water-cycling proxies remain broadly stable through the post-crash period and continue to outperform the forest baseline. In Côte d’Ivoire, the dominant response is not frontier expansion, despite greater frontier availability and weaker enforcement. Instead, repeated and regionally concentrated signs of within-mosaic stress emerge across southwestern cocoa regions after the crash, consistent with farmers reducing maintenance investment within existing plots following the mid-season price cut. By linking a time-stamped commodity shock to spatially explicit ecological outcomes, this thesis argues that financialized commodity pricing is materially inscribed in agricultural landscapes, and that price stabilization systems function not only as income protection but also as forms of environmental governance, with direct implications for land deterioration risk and policy.