brief 40
Natural Resources in Côte d’Ivoire: Fostering Crisis or Peace?
The Cocoa, Diamond, Gold and Oil Sectors
Lena Guesnet, Marie Müller, Jolien Schure
Côte d’Ivoire is at a decisive stage in its political history. Since 2002, the country has been ridden by violent conflict and political unrest. After nearly ten years, Côte d’Ivoire is expecting to hold presidential elections that may end a continued situation of ‘neither peace nor war’, following the end of armed fighting between the government and rebel forces at the end of 2004. The conflict has often been attributed to questions of identity, and the process of identification remains a sensitive and decisive factor with regard to fair elections and social peace. Another important issue, the role of natural resources in the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, has largely been neglected and deserves further attention if the peace process is to lead to some stability. This brief investigates the extent to which natural resources have contributed to causing and sustaining this armed conflict and how natural resource exploitation can contribute to peace and development in Côte d’Ivoire. For this purpose, we have broadened the scope of natural resources in this study to comprise not only extractive resources but also agricultural resources such as cocoa, for until recently the country has depended more heavily on cocoa and coffee than on extractive resources.
The first part of this brief gives a general overview of the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, of the role of natural resource exploitation therein and of current developments in the peace process. The control over natural resources, specifically arable cocoa land, has been a considerable factor in the Ivorian conflict. Attention to natural resource exploitation helps revealing the underlying sources of the identity crisis. Interestingly enough, the influx of a massive number of immigrants to the cocoa regions over a long period of time did not create major social tensions. Many migrants came from Burkina Faso that was once ruled by the French alongside Côte d’Ivoire as one colony. Only in the 1980s, when the cocoa land was exhausted, world cocoa prices fell, and the country went through an economic and political crisis, did the identity issue come to the fore. When the long-lasting president Houphouet-Boigny died shortly after the introduction of multi-party competition in 1993, national politicians instrumentalized the identity question for election purposes—and combined it with the question of who was entitled to control cocoa land and other economic resources.
While the question of natural resource governance is not addressed in the 2007 Ouagadougou Political Agreement (OPA), the implementation of this latest peace agreement is imperative to stabilize the current fragile peace. Implementation of the different areas of the agreement, namely the effective redeployment of the administration in the northern territories of Côte d’Ivoire, the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DD&R) process, and the preparation and holding of national elections that were repeatedly postponed was generally slow. The identification process of voters, an important precondition to elections, has been completed by now, despite a number of voters that were not able to register in time.
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