The rise in Ivorian cocoa production has resulted from an increase in cultivated areas through plantations set up on cleared forest land. These planting dynamics have enabled the country to maintain its position as the world's leading producer for the last quarter of a century. Today, the exhaustion of Ivorian forest reserves raises the question of an alternative to these slash and burn systems. With a view to proposing sustainable and competitive alternative farming systems to extensions on cleared forest, a census of smallholder planting techniques on different previous plant covers has been carried out under an action-research project being jointly implemented by CNRA and CIRAD. The aim was first of all to describe and understand these techniques, and then validate the most promising ones.