2023 年 67 巻 2 号 p. 54-59
Cocoa is a valuable perennial cash crop providing livelihood to millions of people around the world. Despite being classified as a tropical crop, it is a shade-loving plant. Since sufficient amount of shading is required to achieve a high survival rate of cocoa seedlings during early field establishment, farmers are being encouraged to intercrop cocoa seedlings with crops like cocoyam, maize, plantain, and cassava to provide temporary shade while also increasing the farmers’ profit margins. Although plantain-cocoa or banana-cocoa intercropping is the most widely used system among all staple crops, this only results in 20 – 30% cocoa seedling survival rates. Thus, conventional protocols do not fully meet the shading requirements of cocoa. Here, we report recent improvement in cocoa cultivation in Ghana, where an erect branching cassava cultivar referred to as ‘Pole Bankye’ is intercropped with cocoa and plantain to provide adequate shade for cocoa seedlings during early field establishment. This method ensures high seedling survival rates of 70 – 90% even during moderate to severe drought seasons. The Cocoa-Plantain-Cassava (CPC) method is an innovative intercropping pattern of cultivation and now used in Ashanti region of Ghana. Thus, the emerging CPC method can be a means of facilitating its promotion and adoption in cocoa cultivation.
