We are delighted to be able to share with you a revealing portrait of agroforestry in the Dominican Republic.
“The challenges facing cacao agroforestry in the Dominican Republic” is the title of this video, made by our friends at Aado Media and produced by Kinomé under the Forest Carbon Partnership initiative funded by the World Bank. The purpose of this project is to spark a dialogue between cacao-producing countries about best practice in agroforestry.
The film crew travelled to the Dominican Republic in March 2021 where they met Olivier Deheuvels PhD, an expert in tropical agroforestry systems for CIRAD who is also Cacao Forest’s scientific coordinator. Olivier outlined the issues involved in the project and introduced them to the Participatory Experimental Network in Duarte province.
Aado Media also interviewed our partners at CONACADO (Abel Fernandez and Isidoro de la Rosa) and a representative of the Comisión Nacional del Cacao (Yony Molina).
This report does more than showcase the magnificent scenery of the region where Dominican cacao is produced; it raises the same social and ecological issues inherent in cacao cultivation that we became aware of in the initial analysis we undertook before introducing the Cacao Forest initiative. Cacao Forest’s philosophy, based squarely on an agroecological approach to cacao cultivation, is reflected in what our local partners share with viewers in the report. This is an indication that we are already having an impact on the country’s attitude to cacao cultivation. With the day-to-day support of our Dominican partners, the innovations developed by CIRAD and EF are designed to enable cacao-producing families to lift themselves out of poverty while maintaining a high level of agricultural biodiversity in the parcels they farm. This agricultural biodiversity ensures that the industry’s ecosystemic services remain of a high quality. This is exactly what Cacao Forest is striving to do in its daily work on the ground, to ensure that the innovations being introduced are propagated and sustained.
Click on the link below to watch this fascinating film about the agroforestry systems in the Dominican Republic.
https://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/challenges-cocoa-agroforestry-dominican-republiceng
Our grateful thanks go to Aado Media for this extremely well-made report.
