Illegal cocoa farmers' eviction to save Mont Peko National Park

Ivory Coast's Mont Peko National Park has thousands of leafless Samba and Iroko trees that once flourished in the tropics of Africa and now outnumbered by cacao trees, a proof that the cocoa production has greatly increased.

The west coast of Africa is very abundant in Iroko trees and sometimes called Nigerian teak. Although these trees do not belong to the teak family, its wood is tough, dense, and very sturdy. The hardwood is always on demand and is now endangered.

If the tree is planted in a dry, acidic soil and treated with microbes, it produces a very specific mineral. When these microbes are introduced, the tree combines the calcium in the soil and the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce a mineral limestone. The mineral limestone will be stored in the soil around the Iroko's tree roots, according to a blog from the Nourishing the Planet of Worldwatch Institute.

The 34,000-hectare park is already 99% destroyed, officials of the Ivory Coast said. This is due to cocoa farmers seeking benefits from the confusion and disorder shaped by the long decade of political issues in the West African nation, as reported by The Western Australian.

Mount Peko shelters an illegal population of about 28,000 that will experience the first test of the government's new policy. Evacuation is scheduled on December and similar operations will soon be implemented in more than 200 parks and reserves of Ivory Coast.

"The role of a national park is not to produce cocoa," said Adama Tondossama, director of the OIPR, one of the government agencies charged with managing protected land. "Those people who are there are there illegally and we'll fight to get them out."

Out of the 23 national parks and forest reserves in Ivory Coast, thirteen have lost all of their primate species because of the chocolate hunger. A recent study revealed that illegal cacao farms have taken over the space that should be under protection but was left to damage due the chaos in the region.

Primates suffered most from the land conversion wherein five protected areas had lost half of their primate species and 13 had lost all of them. The team neither found king colobus nor Miss Waldron's red colobus which are now believed to be extinct, as reported by the Smithsonian.com.

But the government is yet to face a situation which could be hard to come up in a decision without affecting one or more important things. The government should administer conservation while at the same time prevent social unrest and remain as the world's top cocoa grower.

Any drop in the cocoa production will have a major impact on the price of chocolates around the world.