Cocoa pioneer fronts : the historical determinants

An American journalist in Trinidad in 1859 put his finger on the basic problem of cocoa economies, namely their need for fresh supplies of primary forest to maintain themselves (Chapter 3). Other observers occasionally stumbled on this fundamental truth, but without grasping its implications for the dynamics of the world cocoa economy. It was only in the 1980s that comparative research demonstrated the dependence of cocoa cultivators on the exploitation of a ‘differential forest rent’, in the Ricardian sense of the term (Ruf, 1987, 1991, 1993a).

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