The book’s 30 chapters by 55 authors showcase best practices for tree-crop commodities and how they can contribute to sustainable development in Africa.

Tree-crop commodities highlighted are coffee, cocoa, cashew, palm oil, shea butter and rubber. These commodities are major sources of income for more than 30 million smallholders in Africa. They also represent some of the fastest-growing land uses and constitute an essential part of the continent’s domestic and export economies. At least ten countries — Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Uganda and Tanzania — are dependent on single tree-commodities.

Tree Commodities and Resilient Green Economics examines how best such tree commodities can contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa.

In the humid tropics, a ready market environment for export-oriented tree crops could lead to farming systems generating large income for farmers. In West Africa, this has been the case for cocoa, contributing to more than 90% of the monetary revenue in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Further still, there is evidence that Africa captures very little of the total value of the commodities’ value chains. For example, Africa produces 75% of the world’s cocoa but captures less than 15% of the total market value of the commodity.

Global demand for these commodities continues to soar but opportunities for expansion of land area is also limited, necessitating innovations in the production systems. In recent years, tree-crop plantations have rapidly expanded in Africa’s subtropical regions, contributing to land intensification that can help reduce pressures on natural forests globally.

However, their expansion also possesses multiple economic, social and environmental challenges, such as unfair competition between large plantations and smallholders, productivity gaps, the impact of the climate crisis, poor market access, declining productivity and fluctuating prices. There is also evidence that these commodity systems have flourished at the expense of forests and come with several other externalities: social (for example, land conflicts, land grabbing) and environmental (for example, biodiversity loss, including soil micro-organisms, and impact on human health from pesticides and greenhouse-gas emissions).

The climate crisis, in turn, poses a significant threat to some of the commodities in parts of Africa.

Innovations at large scale will be needed for these systems to respond effectively to the climate crisis as well as the social, economic and other environmental challenges. The book aims to understand innovative options that hold potential to ensure local populations can reap economic and other livelihoods’ benefits while maintaining ecosystem services and social integrity.

The book focused on five key tree commodities grown in Africa: cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, shea and cashew nuts. It is structured in seven parts. Part I explains the motivations of the book, and Part II explores commodity-based case studies from the systems innovation's perspective. Parts III, IV and V examine economic, environmental and governance innovation options, respectively. In part VI, the book presents lessons from across Asia and Latin America that could benefit thinking green tree commodities and Part VII teases emerging lessons from the book and envisages possible ways forward.