Chocolate in Peril
Disease, drought and deforestation threaten the all-important cacao crop.
Dec. 18, 2008— -- Is there any treat more decadent, more luxurious than chocolate? Well, it need not be a guilty pleasure - and not just because of growing evidence that eating the stuff can be good for you in some ways. Another reason to enjoy every delicious morsel this holiday is that the chocolate you eat was almost certainly grown on small farms in poor countries. When you buy chocolate, you help poor farmers feed their families. It's a start, at least.
The bad news for chocoholics is that the supply could start to run low. Chocolate is made from the fermented, roasted seeds of the cacao tree, whose scientific name is Theobroma, or "food of the gods". In recent years, demand has risen worldwide. Meanwhile, diseases destroy a third of the world's cacao crop every year, and that toll is set to get worse as they spread around the globe. What's more, cacao is a rainforest tree with shallow roots that hates drought, and droughts have hit harvests hard in recent years. Things could get worse as climate change gathers pace.
The good news is that help is at hand. Enter the scientists from Mars. Thanks to the biggest chocolate company in the world, Mars Inc., an unprecedented study of the cacao tree is now under way. Remarkably, the results are being made freely available. This is not pure generosity - you cannot sell chocolate if no one is growing it - but it could be good for everyone.
Supply can keep up with the world's growing chocolate hunger in two ways: by increasing the cacao-growing area or the yield of cacao per hectare. Since cacao is grown by poor people in poor countries - Africa grows 70 per cent of cacao, mostly in Ivory Coast and Ghana - there has been only sporadic investment in improving the trees. The cultivated strains are prone to drought and diseases, few farmers can afford fertiliser or pesticides to boost yields and what efforts there have been to breed better trees have been discouraging. "The yield of cacao has been flat for 30 years," says Howard Shapiro, head of plant science at Mars.
