2 June 2026Abstract Across the tropics, cocoa is one of the main drivers of deforestation. In Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa producer, the role of each of the main economic sectors in driving deforestation remains, however, contested—with cocoa, mining, logging, and plantations each blaming the others. Previous work has also suggested that food crops are displaced into forests by cocoa expansion, raising concerns about indirect land-use change and impacts on food availability. Here, using satellite-based maps and secondary data, we quantify the direct deforestation and forest degradation between 2000 and 2019 in the entire cocoa-growing region of Ghana which is attributed to the land uses (LUs) detected in 2019. Then, we use a land-balance approach to assess the indirect role of the expansion of LUs in deforestation and degradation for food crops. We find that cocoa was the major direct driver over that period (