Qualla: Mont Peko National Park

Mont Peko National Park: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For more than a decade, an armed group controlled a national park in western Ivory Coast. Their leader sold thousands of hectares to cocoa farmers from neighboring Burkina Faso, trafficked gold, timber, and ivory, and turned a protected forest into a patchwork of illegal plantations. By the time the Ivorian government moved to reclaim Mont Peko National Park in 2016, an estimated 70 percent of the park had been destroyed. The eviction that followed displaced tens of thousands of people, many of whom had built homes and livelihoods inside the park's boundaries over the preceding years. Mont Peko's story is not a simple tale of conservation versus encroachment -- it is a case study in how civil conflict, poverty, commodity markets, and environmental protection tangle into knots that no single policy can untie.

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Mont Peko National Park: The Mountain and the Forest

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mont Peko National Park sits in the Montagnes District of western Ivory Coast, centered on the twin peaks that give it its name. Mont Peko, the higher summit at 997 meters, rises above surrounding lowlands covered in dense forest -- or what used to be dense forest. When the park ...

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Mont Peko National Park: Apes in the Canopy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A census conducted in April 2001 by researchers Herbinger and Lia offered a snapshot of the park's primate population at a critical moment -- just before the Ivorian civil war would upend the region. Using transect lines totaling 12.5 kilometers through the forest, they estimated...

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Mont Peko National Park: Cocoa, Conflict, and Displacement

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ivory Coast's civil conflicts in the 2000s created a power vacuum in the west that armed groups filled. In Mont Peko, an armed faction took control of the park and effectively converted it into a commercial enterprise -- selling land to farmers, most of them migrants from Burkina...

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Mont Peko National Park: Recovery and Reckoning

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today Mont Peko stands as both a conservation challenge and a test of Ivory Coast's ability to balance environmental protection with social justice. The park's forests are regenerating in some areas, but the scars of a decade of illegal farming are visible from the air -- clearin...

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