Portrait of Côte d’Ivoire: Exploring Communities and Crops

Noah Jackson — an independent trainer and auditor for the Rainforest Alliance — shares photos of farms and farm families throughout Côte d’Ivoire.

In addition to the regular work of planting and cultivating cash crops on their Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms, the majority of smallholders in West Africa also plant, grow, harvest and store their own food.

In Côte d’Ivoire, rice and maize are the primary staple crops. This elevated hut of maize keeps out chickens and pests, and helps to feed a family through the dry season.

On a nearby farm, a family takes a break to snack on mango, coconut and pineapple – fruits that are grown on their cocoa farm.

On her way back from harvesting sweet potato and pineapple, this woman takes a shortcut through a neighbor’s cocoa garden.

An extended family shares locally raised chicken. The chickens feed off cover crops grown on the cocoa farm.

Dried okra, ready to be added to a pot of stew or stored away, waits to be traded at a Saturday market in a small village compound.

Nuts are an important protein source. Grown with the help of nitrogen fixing trees, they provide an additional source of income, crop diversity and another layer of shade for cocoa farms.

Wild mushrooms are collected from forests and farms, and serve as an additional food source. Trees can also be inoculated with spores to encourage production.

Cocoa yams, harvested from the farm, are dried using a time-tested drying method that relies on wind and sun, which help to preserve the tubers.

Tapioca (also known as cassava) grows along the edge of a Rainforest Alliance Certified cocoa farm. Rich in starch, both the tubers and their leaves are edible.

Cassava can also be processed into flour with a texture similar to couscous.

On another farm, a family separates palm fruit from their kernels to make soups, sauces and palm oil. While they’ll sell some of this palm oil, much of it will be stored and processed during the seasonal harvest.

An old, abandoned coffee farm waits to be cleared for garden land and cocoa land. Communities must grow commodity crops like cocoa to earn a decent living, but there is always a need to save land for subsistence crops.

In many parts of West Africa, it is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire seeds, which means that storing seeds for staple crops is more important than ever.

Avocados provide a rich source of protein during the fruiting season.