Environmental change and normalization of cash crop systems in Africa: preventing agrarian change in West Africa cocoa

ABSTRACT

In recent years, environmental and demographic crises have often been associated with increasing hunger and poverty in agrarian societies. The potential of such crisis to play a positive role in the evolution of agriculture and agricultural societies has been overlooked. Environmental crises such as deforestation for example (in a production where forestland is a production factor) are points of resource alteration that require corresponding alterations in farming systems. Normalization occurs when farmers are induced to defy such signals indicating the need to diversify and instead choose to continue along their existing path regardless of the changing resource endowment. In the absence is replacement of the vital production factor such continuity has to be paid for.