COCABO Organic Shade-Cacao Agroforestry — Sustaining Bird Diversity in Bocas del Toro (Panama)

COCABO (Cooperativa de Cacao Bocatoreña), founded in 1986, is a smallholder organic and fair-trade cacao cooperative in Panama's Bocas del Toro province, where farmers grow cacao under a diverse shade canopy rather than clearing forest for monoculture.

Between roughly 2003 and 2005, researchers working with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute conducted point-count bird surveys across COCABO's shade-cacao agroforestry farms and adjacent forest fragments to compare their value as bird habitat.

The survey recorded 234 landbird species in total: 86 species found only in cacao farms, 46 species found only in the remaining forest fragments, and 102 species shared between both habitat types — evidence that traditional shade-cacao agroforestry sustains substantial bird biodiversity, not merely the adjacent forest remnants.

The figure comes from a single ~2003–2005 field season rather than continuous monitoring, and the same study found understory insectivorous birds were nearly absent from cacao farms even though canopy and edge species were rich — so the biodiversity benefit is habitat-specific rather than universal across bird guilds. Current-day (2020s) farm area or membership figures for COCABO could not be independently corroborated and are not claimed here.

Read the full analysis: https://repository.si.edu/items/760098df-a511-48e5-b8c0-9f03f015a4d3