This region comprises Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d'lvoire, Togo, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria. With the exception of Nigeria, agriculture there is dominated by rice cultivation. The percentage of total land area that is under cultivation ranges from 60 percent in Liberia to just 9 percent in Sierra Leone.
The total cultivable area of Ghana is 39,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers), or 42 percent of its total land area. Only 4.8 percent of the total land area was under cultivation at the end of the twentieth century. Much of the cultivation is subsistence farming of yams and other crops. Ghana's efforts in agriculture have been hampered by droughts. Additional problems are that organic matter has been leached out of the soils by heavy rainfall and that increasing deforestation has led to additional erosion. This is the situation in much of the Gulf of Guinea and the central regions. About half of Nigeria's available land is under cultivation. Increasing rainfall from the semiarid north to the tropically forested south allows for great crop diversity. Principal food crops are corn, millet, yams, sorghum, cassava, rice, potatoes, and vegetables. Nigeria was the world's fourth-largest exporter of cocoa beans in 1990-1991, accounting for about 7.1 percent of world trade in this commodity. However, Nigeria's share of the world cocoa market has been substantially reduced because of aging trees, low prices, black pod disease, smuggling, and labor shortages.
See also: Sudano-Sahelian Region, Eastern Region, Central Region, Indian Ocean Islands
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