Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back

8/13/2019 Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back

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W ORLD WATCHWor k i n g For A Su st a i n a bl e Fu t u r e

W ORLD WATCH

O R L D WAT C HN S T I T U T EWIW 1776 M assachusetts Ave. , N WWashington, DC 20036www.worldwatch.org

Chocolate Could Bringthe Forest Back

Excerpted from N ovember/December 2001 WORLD WATCH magazine

by Chris Bright

For more information about Worldwatch Inst itute and its programs and publications,please visit our website at www.worldwatch.org

2001, Worldw a tch Institute
http://www.worldwatch.org/http://www.worldwatch.org/http://www.worldwatch.org/http://www.worldwatch.org/


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the infected 200-hectare stand w as sprayed w ith fun-gicide and burned by officials from CEPLAC (theC omisso Executiva do P lano da Lavoura C acaueira),Brazils premier cocoa research agency. Towards theend of the year, however, a much larger infestationwas discovered on another farm, where workers hadapparently cut away some of the infected trees andthrown them in nearby rivers. From that moment,any hope of avoiding an epidemic was lost. The fun-gus had reached out of Amazonia. It was going toswallow the prosperity of Bahia. It would become avegetab le version o f the Black Death.

So much was invested in the Bahian cocoa appa-ratus and now it is broken. In the wake of the fungalinvasion, the harvest has collapsed from its peak ofnearly 400,000 tons in the late 1980s to 105,000tons today. The local economy has gone the way ofthe harvest. The export value of one of those peakyields probably approached $900 million. But in1999, cocoa exports for the whole of Brazil, asreported to the U .N. Food and Agriculture Organi-zat ion, came to only $4.9 million (bot h figures are inyear 2000 dollars). And according t o C EP LAC, some90,000 farm workers have lost their jobs. The area inproduction has shrunk too, from around 600,000hectares to perhaps 450,000 hectares today.

But none of t his is even detectable in the int erna-tional cocoa market. And its easy to see why itwouldnt be, if you look through the graphs begin-ning on page 22, which show various aspects of thatmarket. Cocoa is now grown throughout the trop-icsits a crop in increasingly plentiful supply. Pro-duction is expanding and the general price trend isdownw ards. Brazil currently produces only 4 percentof the worlds cocoa, down from 24 percent in 1983.In Africa, Cte dIvoire, which already accounts for42 percent of global production, is continuing toratchet up its output on the strength of a labor sys-tem that reportedly includes child slavery, althoughthe extent of this practice is a matter of dispute. (Afuture issue of W ORLD WATC H will include an updat eon African cocoa.) In Southeast Asia, Vietnam and

Malaysia are reportedly considering mass plantings ofthe latest, most productive cacao clones. Even if thewitches broom could be eradicated tomorrow,intense competition and low prices would seem tooffer little hope t o Bahia s farmers.

So perhaps the witches broom is only the proxi-mate cause of Bahias troubles. Perhaps theres a kindof systemic dysfunction below the disease. After all,the fungus owes its ferocious infective power tointensive monoculture, and in Bahia, this systemappears to have gone just about as far as the localeconomy can take it. Something has got to change.Bahias cocoa farmers are going to have to makesome d ecisions.

And t hose decisions will be a matt er of glob al bio-logical import ance. Those huge trees dominating t hecacao on Eduardos farm, as on thousands of otherBahian farms, are part of the Mata Atlntica, orAtlantic Forest, one of the most biologically diversebiomes in the worldand one of the most endan-gered. Less than 8 percent of the original forestremains. Because of its richness and rareness, theAtlantic Forest is considered a biodiversity hotspot a top priority for global conservation.(For an overview of the Atlantic Forest biome, see The Restoration of a H otspot Begins, page 8.)

In Bahia, which is in the northern portion of thebiome, the forest was often thinned so that cacaocould be planted as an understory crop. Some 50 to60 percent of Bahian cacao is grown in this agro-forestry system, which is known in Brazilian Por-tuguese as cabr uca . This arrangement approximatescacaos native habitat, although it admits more lightto stimulate more fruit production. But the nativeecology of cacao was not what inspired farmers toextend cabruca into so much of Bahias remainingforest. They were responding to two lessons fromtheir own experience: (1) cacao does well in this sys-tem, and (2) cutting down immense trees is hardwork. So where the objective was to produce cocoarather than timber, they cut as little as possible.H ence cabruca, a d e facto conservation system, and

18 WORLD WATC H November/D ecember 2001

ca. 1000 B . C .: The trees earliest knownname, kakawa, comes into use amongthe Olmec, the people of the Mexican Gulf Coast who built the first of the great Meso-american civilizations. It is likely that theOlmec are cultivating the tree.

400 B . C . A . D . 100: The Maya of northernGuatemala adopt the word cacao fromthe Olmec. The tree is presumably coming

into cultivation among the Maya as well.

450500: Clay chocolate-drinking vesselsbegin to appear among the grave goods of the Maya nobilitystrong evidence thatchocolate consumption is an importantstatus symbol. (The Maya consumed theirchocolate as a foamy liquid often lacedwith red pepper and other spices.)

ca. 900: By the time classic Maya civiliza-tion collapses and the Toltec state emerges,

cocoa beans are a major Mesoamerican

commodity. Control of the main cocoa-growing regions becomes a prime objectivein the intermittent warfare that scars the nextseveral centuries.

ca. 1500: The Aztec empire, founded inthe late 14th century in the area that isnow Mexico City, annexes the richestcocoa region in Mesoamerica: Xoconochco(along the Pacific coast of modern Chiapas,

Mexico and Guatemala).

A Cacao Chronology:Critical Moments in the Relationship Between Theobroma cacao and Homo sapiens


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Raising Foam

I ndigenous Mesoamerican chocolate was consumed as a liquid with a thick, foamy head, the most valued portion of the drink. This watercolor,from a 16th century book known as the Codex Tudela,shows an Aztec noblewoman raising foam by pouring the

chocolate from one vessel to another. Although the image is Europeanized, experts regard it as an authentic rep- resentation of Aztec life in the conquest period. The Codex Tudela is in the collection of the Museo de Amrica, in Madrid. Reproduced with

permission.

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the reason there is still forest in places like Eduardosfarm. You could say that the fate of those giant treesis now linked to the fate of the little trees they shelter.

The $60 billion flavorThe fruit of the cacao tree is a thick-rinded pod,

about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. But the podvaries a good deal in size, and in most other traits,depending on the type of cocoa being grown. Some-times it s long and narrow, so that it looks like a minia-ture U .S. foot ball, but partly deflated and coveredwith thick, longitudinal ridges. Somet imes it loo ks likea squat, warty, little melon. Sometimes its green;sometimes it s a medley of g reen, yellow, and red. Thepods develop directly from the trees trunk and mainbranches, rather than from its peripheral growth, aswith most fru it t rees. This characteristic can look quiteodd the first time you see it. A tree in full fruit lookslike it is being at tacked by a swarm of parasitic gourds.

Inside the pod is a tight, cylindrical whorl of 20to 40 white or whitish-purple seeds, in an arrange-ment that looks a little like an ear of corn but withgiant kernels and almost no cob. The seeds areenveloped in a sweet, white pulp. In South America,the native peoples sometimes scoop the seeds from apod and suck off the pulp, but they spit t he seeds out.Raw cocoa seeds are bitter; they dont even hint attheir potential to produce one of the worlds mostintoxicating tastes.

Before people started moving the cacao treearound, its range probably extended from upperAmazonia into Central America, perhaps as far northas Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. In theSouth American part of its range, t he indigenous peo-ples apparently never discovered the simple alchemythat will convert cocoa seeds to chocolate. But alongthe G ulf Coast of southern Mexico, the O lmec peo-ple were probably cultivating the treeand maybeeven producing chocolateas early as 1000 B.C .Cacao was so important among later Mesoamericanculturesthe Maya, the Toltec, the Aztecthat itsbeans were used as a currency throughout the region.The consumption of chocolatewhich among the

Aztec, at least, appears to have been a prerogative ofthe wealthywas literally a way of eating money.

The nat ive Mesoamerican peoples consumed t heirchocolate in liquid form. The beans were lightly fer-mented, then dried, roasted, and ground on a stonemetate . The resulting powder was flavored with vari-ous other substancesred pepper was a favorite addi-tionand stirred into water. By holding a vessel ofthis liquid at chest height and carefully pouring itinto another on the ground, a skillful preparer couldraise a thick foam, the most valued portion of thedrink. (The foam was produced by the fat in thecocoathe cocoa butt er and sometimes also byspecial foaming additives.) Mesoamerican peoplesseem to have had a substantial repertoire of choco-late-containing beverages and porridges. We know this, for example, from the writings of the notoriousDiego de Landa, the 16th century Bishop of theYucatan who was responsible for the mass murders ofhundreds of Maya; Landa liked the taste of variousMayan chocolate-cornmeal g ruels.

In the early 17th century, chocolate arrived in theOld World and became a favorite refreshment at t heSpanish court. Over the course of the century, itspread from one European elite to another, becomingsomewhat democratized in the processcheapenough, by the end of the century, to be enjoyed bythe merchant classes. About a hundred years after itsarrival, its popularity in London was such that choco-late houses had begun to supplant the citys famouscoffee houses. (As in the New World, all Europeanchocolate of this era was consumed as a liquid; solid eating chocolate of reasonable quality was not avail-able until 1847.) The Europeans discarded most ofthe Mesoamerican additives, although they oftenretained vanilla, which is prepared from the seed podof a Central American orchid. But they substitutedmany seasonings of their own. An elaborate recipemight call for ambergris, a waxy, violet-scented sub-stance that accumulates in sperm whale intestines andsometimes washes up on tropical beaches. A morecommonplace preparation might include cinnamon orcloves, but by far the most durable European additionwas sugar. Mesoamerican choco late does not appear tohave been sweetened. (These details are taken fromthe fascinating culinary history of chocolate, The Tr ue

H i stor y of C hocola te , by Sophie and Michael C oe.)Apart from the chang e in seasonings, early Euro -

1521: Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, fallsto Hernan Cortes. The conquistadores dis-cover that cocoa beans are in use through-out Mesoamerica as a currencya practicethat is probably many centuries old.

1544: A delegation of Kekchi Maya fromGuatemala visits the Spanish court of PrincePhilip (later Philip II). Among the gifts are

containers of the Mayan chocolate drinkthe first recorded appearance of cocoa inthe Old World.

1560: The earliest known introductionof cacao into Asia: the tree is brought tothe island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, fromCaracas, Venezuela.

1585: The first official shipment of cocoabeans reaches Seville.

1590: This may be the date at which theSpanish introduce cacao to Africa, bybringing the tree to Fernando Po (nowBioko), an island off the coast of Cameroon. By other accounts, the firstAfrican introduction did not occur until


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pean chocolate was prepared in essentially the sameway that the Maya and Aztec prepared theirs. Eventoday, the ancient Mesoamerican procedure stilloperates deep within the industrial machine: thebeans are still lightly fermented, dried, roasted, andground. But then a set of more complex techniquescomes into play. The powder may be dut ched(treated with potassium or sodium carbonates tomake it easier to mix in water), defatted (by remov-ing much of the cocoa butter), conched (ground asa liquid in special stone vats), or combined with milkto produce milk chocolate.

Yet despite the increasingly sophisticated technol-ogy that is being directed at the cocoa bean, the tasteof chocolate itself remains chemically indefinable. Inher book, The Emper or s of Chocolat e , Jo l G lennBrenner describes the state of current research intothe chocolate flavor: apparently, the taste is a com-posite sensation created by some 1,200 different sub-stances, none of which clearly dominates the others.Some of these substances taste just awful on theirow n; B renner mentions one that has the flavor of rot -ten fish. The beans chemical complexity is one of thereasons why you dont find bars of artificial choco lateat t he local market. (C arob, a tropical fruit sometimessold as a chocolate substitute, could be considered aperfectly authentic food in its own right.)

Chocolate has another quality that might make ithard to imitate artificially: the behavior of its fat.Cocoa butter has a melting point just slightly lowerthan the temperature of the human body. When youeat a piece of chocolate, the cocoa butter melts inyour mouth, releasing the flavor complex. The melt-ing itself creates that velvety mout h feel that ischaracteristic of chocolate. And since cocoa butter isnot readily absorbed by the human bo dy, t his is not afat that is likely to make you fat.

But while substitut ion is not a likely development,adulteration is common. Cocoa is a relatively expen-sive ingredientrelative, that is, to sugar or vegetableoil. So its not surprising that conventional manufac-turing should favor these latter ingredients overcocoa. And indeed, there is not much chocolate inmany mass-market chocolates. The cocoa but ter is

often replaced by cheaper fats, such as lecithin orpalm oil, which are also easier to work with when

manufacturing chocolate coat ings. The proportion o fcocoa solids (the nonfat component of the groundbeans) tends to be fairly low as well. In a commonchocolate bar, for example, it may be about 20 per-cent, or as low as 10 percent if the candy is a filledchocolate product. Premium chocolate, on t heother hand, is typically around 50 percent cocoasolids, but it can be as high as 70 percent. Andbecause it contains much less sugar and little if anyvegetable oil, upscale chocolate generally has farfewer calories than the standard products. Chocolateafficionados often argue that chocolate ends up tak-ing the blame for problems actually caused by exces-sive sugar consumption.

Modern chocolate-making serves a global marketthat is worth more than $60 billion annually. Andfrom cocoa beans to chocolate bars, the industry hasincreasingly come to be dominated by a small num-ber of large companiesa trend that is typical ofprocessed foo ds in general. (See Where H ave All theFarmers Go ne? September/O ctober 2000.)Because the chocolate business is intensely competi-tive, companies tend to keep their statistics to them-selves and comprehensive market-share data aredifficult to find. But according to an article in theMarch/April 2000 issue of Can dy Bu si ness magazine,the ten largest primary processors of cocoa now account for 67 percent of the worlds ground beans;that figure is projected to rise to 75 percent by theend of the decade. Can dy Busi ness reports that threeintermediate processors (Barry C allebaut, AD MCocoa, and Blommer Chocolate) now control about55 percent o f the wo rlds industrial chocolate(chocolate th at has yet t o b e processed into a finishedproduct). The retail level is dominated by six multi-nationals: H ershey, M ars, P hilip Mo rris (which ownsKraft-Jacobs-Suchard-Cte dOr), Nestl, Cadbury-Schweppes, and Ferrero; in 1998, according to theEuro pean Fair Trade Association , t hese six companiescontrolled about 80 percent of the retail market.

Fruit of the shadeChocolate owes its origin to tropical rainforest,

the richest ecosystem type on earth in terms ofspecies diversity. On the long list of benefits that such

1822, when the tree was established on theisland of Prncipe, south of Bioko.

16001650: Chocolate becomes afavorite drink of the Spanish court.

ca. 1600: According to some accounts,this is the era in which the Spanish bringcacao to the Philippines, a Spanish colony

since 1543. (Other accounts suggest thatcacao does not arrive there until 1663.)

1657: Londons first chocolate houseopens.

1659: In France, David Chalious is grant-ed a royal monopoly on the production of chocolate, which is acquiring a medical

mystique. All sorts of medicinal propertiesare attributed to it.

1668: Florence, Italy has at least onechocolate house; the chocolate drink hasbecome popular with Florentines who canafford it.

ca. 1680: The French begin major



forests have conferred upon humanity, there is a linesomewhere for chocolatewell below the ent ries forcarbon storage, presumably, or hydrological stability,but its there. A pleasant but rather trivial gift of theforestas long as you think of the benefit workingonly in our direction. But chocolate may be a matterof profound importance, if we can repay that gift byconsuming it in a way that will benefi t the forests.

Certainly, those forests need all the help they canget. They are unraveling rapidly, primarily because oflogging and burning (to clear land for pasture andcrops). The data on tropical deforestation are vague

and conflicting, but its likely that the average annu-al loss currently exceeds 130,000 sq uare kilometersan area nearly the size of G reece. (This estimat ecomes from the World Resources Institut e PilotAnalysis of G loba l Ecosystems, or PAGE project,which was released last year.) And thats only the areadeforested outright: nearby forest communities gen-erally suffer a great deal of collateral damage in theform of habitat loss, drying, additional burning,hunting pressure, and the invasion of nonnativespecies. But the extent of such degradation is evenharder to quantify than the deforestation itself.

D espite all the attent ion that this problem hasreceived over the past several decades, it is still far fromclear, in most of these forests, whether conservation

will prevail in any meaningful way. The technical stud-ies continue to pile up, but there are still basic dis-agreements over what conservation strategies workbest. From a purely ecological point of view, the mosteffective approach would seem t o be pretty simple: putthe most valuable remaining forests behind parkboundaries. But even when those boundaries areenforcedand frequently they arentthe areasenclosed are not usually large enough to sustain thefull range of ecosystem processes over the long term.The standard alternative is sustainable forest manag e-ment (SFM), which att empts to make the forests pay

their way into the future by logging them at a sustain-able rate. But this approach too has come in for seriouscriticism. A recent study by C onservation Internationalargues that SFM is not economically competitive withconventional logging practicesand that it is not nec-essarily less destructive either. The latter point mightseem to be ruled out by definition, but it hinges onwhat is being defined as sustainable: a moderate t imberyield may be sustainable more or less indefinitely, butthe cutting may not sustain the original structure andcomposition of the forest. (The CI study suggests thatwhere logging is inevitable, the best conservationoption may often be to allow conventional logg ing andthen to protect the cut-over area.)

At first glance, it may be hard to see much con-

Variation in Production in the Ten LargestCocoa-Producing Countries, 19962000

1,300,000

1,300,000

0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000

47,162

51,558

95,000

98,000

120,000

348,000

397,700

Cte dIvoire

1,200,000 1,300,000

225,000

125,000

Cte dIvoire

Colombia

Ecuador

Malaysia

Cameroon

Brazil

Nigeria

Indonesia

Ghana

Dominican Rep.

The bands indicate variation in production from 1996 through 2000. The bars indicate year 2000 production (these data are provisional). The numbers give the value of the bars. Units are metric tons.Sources: FAO STAT datab ase , and CEPLAC for yea r 200 0 Brazil figures.

production of cocoa on the Caribbeanisland of Martinique.

17001720: In London, chocolate houseseclipse coffeehouses and taverns as centersfor amusement, business, and politicaldebate.

1727: A major blight devastates

Trinidads cacao plantations, which areplanted with a variety of the tree known ascriollo , native to southern central America.By the 1750s, Trinidads plantations havebeen replanted with a different variety,forastero , from northern South America.Hybridization of the forastero imports withthe criollo blight survivors produces cacaosonly other major variety: the trinitario .

1746: French attempts to break theSpanish dominance of cocoa productionbring cacao to the state Bahia, in Brazil(well south of the trees native Brazilianrange). The transplant is a huge but adelayed success: Bahia becomes a majorcocoa-producing region by the end of the19th century.


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servation potential in the cacao tree, since in mostplaces where it is grown, its relationship to the foresthas hardly been benign. Nearly 7 million hectares(70,000 square kilometers) are now in cocoa produc-tionan area about the size of Ireland. Virtually allof t his area was once tropical rainforest and in a go oddeal of it, the forest was obliterated for the expresspurpose of growing cocoa. And yet, the arrival ofcocoa has not always caused t he complete dissolutionof forest; plantation conditions vary greatly. Cacao issometimes grown on cleared ground, and in full sunonce the young trees are established. (The more light

it receives, the more productive a tree is likely to be,at least over the short term. Thats the advantage ofgrowing in full sun; the disadvantage is that the treeis more prone to stressfrom drying, for exampleso its productive life may be shorter.) But becausecacao is adapted to shade, its commonly maintainedunder some sort of loose canopy, either a thinnednative forest or a tree plantation.

This shade to lerance is a promising asset. C oco a isone o f tho se crops, like shade-grown coffee, that cansupply an economic rationale for preserving tropicalforest canopy, albeit in a modified state. Cacao hasseveral other characteristics that could make it a valu-able ally of the forests. I n the first place, it s fairly easyon the soil, because of its heavy, soil-building leaf lit-

ter and because its nutrient demand is relatively low,at least for moderate levels of production. Second,its a rainforest exclusive: because of its temperatureand moisture requirements, it cannot be grown com-mercially outside tropical rainforest areas. Any valuethat cocoa adds to these areas cannot therefore bedepreciated by production elsewhere. Finally, its ahotspot crop. All the major cocoa-producing areasare so rich in biodiversity that they rank as hotspots:the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Mesoamerica, the westAfrican forests, the Indonesian-Malaysian archipela-go, and Southeast Asia. If cocoa can be fashioned

into a tool for conservation, it would appear to be ato ol o f considerable strategic import ance.But clearly, business as usual is not going to

accomplish this transformation. A forest friendlycocoa would relate to the landscape in a way that isvery different from the current standard. To beginwith, it would have to embrace the three principlesthat appear to be coalescing into a new paradigm fortropical agroforestry. In other words, more and morecocoa would have to b e:

Organic , that is, grown without artificial fertilizeror pesticides. Organic production avoids the damagedone to soils, w aterways, and forest b y pesticides andsynthetic fertilizer.

Fair -tr aded , that is, sold into an audited system

0 200,000 400,000

19,400

263

63,600

25,469

98,100

3,918

196,377

333,695

280,914

1,000,000

1,081,562

800,000

Cte dIvoire

Malaysia

Cameroon

Nigeria

Indonesia

Ghana

Brazil

Ecuador

Colombia

Dominican Rep.

Cte dIvoire

1,000,000

The bands indicate variation in export tonnage from 1995 through 1999. The bars indicate 1999 tonnage. The numbers give the value of the bars. Units are metric tons.Source: FAO STAT datab ase .

Variation in Export Tonnage in the Ten LargestCocoa-Producing Countries, 199599

1765: Chocolate production begins inNorth America, with the establishment of acocoa bean grinding mill in Massachusetts.

1778: The Dutch bring cacao from thePhilippines to Jakarta, Sumatra, where theyestablish a propagation facility that soonleads to major production in the Dutch EastIndies (now Indonesia and Malaysia).

1828: The Dutch chemist Conrad vanHooten patents a technique for pressingmost of the fat from roasted and crushedcocoa beans, improving the digestibility of the resulting powder. The addition of alka-line salts makes the powder easier to mixin water. This Dutch cocoa permits massproduction of cheap chocolate.

1847: The English manufacturer J.S. Fry &Sons uses cocoa powder to create the firstsuccessful mass-produced chocolate bar.

18501860: The cocoa pod borer, amoth whose larvae infest the cacao fruit,emerges in the Indonesian archipelago.Established plantations are ruined, and pro-duction is driven ever further into previously



that guarantees growers a decent price and farmworkers a decent wage. This is obviously of greatsocial import ance, but it s ecologically important too,because it can help build broad economic support forthe other elements of this paradigm.

And finally, shade-gr own u nder n at i ve, regener at - i ng forest . (Of course, only forests that have alreadybeen substantially altered should be used for shadecultivation; cacao should no longer be planted intoundisturbed forest.) Bahias cabruca system alreadypartly meets this need, but unlike standard cabruca, areally ecological cocoa would have to allow forcanopy regenerationthat is, instead of managingthe understo ry purely for cacao, forest saplings wouldhave to be allowed to emerge, to replace the canopytrees when they eventually die.

There is strong precedent for t he shade criterion inthe cabruca system, and fair trade is essentially just acommon-sense labor right. (That doesnt make it easyto achieve, but at least its not hard to understand.)It s the first item, o rganic production, t hat can be t hetoughest sell. Many farmers seem to have a hard timebelieving that large-scale organic production is possi-ble, and it is true that the transition t o o rganic can betough. It usually takes several years to learn the skills

of organic growing and to build the systems resist-ance to pests. Organic certification, through an inde-

pendent organization o r sometimes through a go vern-ment program, is the key to receiving the higher pricethat organic products generally command, but thattakes time too. Its usually about three years beforefarm soils can be certified as clear of pesticide residues.

Once the transition is complete, however, organ-ic can make as much sense financially as it does eco-logically. C onsider the o rganic cocoa program run bythe Bahian environmental group IESB (Instituto deEstudos Scio-Ambientais do Sul da Bahia). As ofAugust 2001, t he program had enrolled 75 farms, ofwhich 20 had completed the three-year transition tocertified organic. Those 75 farms cover about 5,800hectares, mostly in cabruca; the certified farmsaccount for 834 hectares of t he to tal. A separate dis-tribution system has been set up for the harvest: itssold abroad through a local cooperative, rather thanthrough the big international processors that buyconventional cocoa. Pests like the witches broomtend to be less of a problem in organic systems,because the cacao is less dense. But as you mightexpect, the harvest is also smaller. IESB estimates theorganic yields at 40 to 90 percent of conventionalyields, t he range b eing largely a function of variationin soil fertility. That migh t not sound very encourag-

ing until you look at the bottom line. Because organ-ic systems dont use expensive agrochemicals, the

undisturbed forest. The borer remainscacaos most important insect pest.

1853: The Cadbury family business,which had begun as a tea and coffee shopin Birmingham, becomes purveyor of choco-late to Queen Victoria. Cadbury-Schweppesis now one of the worlds largest chocolatecompanies.

1879: The first really successful introduc-tion of cacao to the African mainlandoccurs, when the tree is brought from theisland of Fernando Po (now Bioko) to theGold Coast (now Ghana).

1879: In Switzerland, the chemist HenriNestl and the chocolate manufacturerDaniel Peter find a way to mix chocolate

with milkan objective that had frustratedchocolate afficionados for centuries. Toovercome the incompatibility between thetwo substances, they use a low-fat formof chocolate (cocoa powder), and a low-water form of milk (condensed milkanearlier Nestl invention). The mixture isthen enriched with additional cocoa butter

20

Cte dIvoire

Malaysia

Cameroon

Nigeria

Indonesia

Ghana

Brazil

Ecuador

Colombia

Dominican Rep.

0

1,800

1,800

0.4

65

30

116

4.9

302

303

420

1,780

Cte dIvoire

Variation in Export Value in the Ten LargestCocoa-Producing Countries, 199599

200 400 600 800 1,000

The bands indicate variation in export values from 1995 through 1999. The bars indicate 1999 values. The numbers give the value of the bars.Units are millions of year 2000 dollars.Source: FAO STAT database (historical dollar values have been converted).


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production costs are usually much low er, so net prof-it may rise even when yield declines. On its certifiedfarms, IESB reports an average increase in net profitof about 80 percent.

The international picture is a scaled-up version ofthe Bahian one. Various forms of shade-grown, organ-ic, fair-traded cocoa are being sold by small, boutiq uechocolate companies. (Many of these companies arelisted in the links page of the International CocoaOrganization website, www.icco.org.) But the amountof cocoa produced for this niche market is a tiny per-centage of the global harvest. For example, only about6,000 tons of organic cocoa are produced annually;thats less than two-tenths of 1 percent of total cocoaproduction. And yet, even this small-scale productionis proof that organic cocoa works.

This new paradigm is fundamental, but its justthe beginning, and it may turn out to berelativelyspeakingthe easy part. H eres what w ill almost cer-tainly be the hard part: a truly ecological cocoa willhave to be a force for forest cont i nu i ty . In their pres-ent state, t he cabruca stands and t he other forest frag-ments in Bahia are generally too small to supportgenetically viable populations of many plants and ani-mals over the long term. Even where the stands areregenerating, they will still tend to lose species even-tually. To prevent this, cabruca management will haveto be integrated into a broader strategy that aims toconnect the fragments to each other by planting for-est corridors between them. If the corridors are topreserve both the species diversity of the forest andthe genetic diversity of individual tree species, theywill have to be planted with seedlings from local frag-ments. The current fragments, in ot her words, are thegene banks from which t he future forests must g row.

Reinventing cocoa Monoculture can be a very successful way o f

grow ing crops, says Martin Aitken, who runs theMars companys cocoa research facility in Bahia. butwhen it goes wrong , it goes spectacularly wrong. InBahia, monoculture has gone just about as wrong asit can go. That fact, combined with certain other con-

ditions, may have created an unusual opportunity: atthis time, Bahia may be the best place in t he world t o

launch a large-scale effort to develop a forest-friendlycocoa. The need for chang e, the capacity for change,and a major ecological benefit for changeall theseelements have now emerged in Bahia.

The need for change: In order to overcome thewitches broom, many stands of cacao are going tohave to be replaced by more resistant stock. CEPLACreleased its first generation of resistant cacao cultivarsin 1997 and so far, 35,000 to 50,000 hectares havebeen planted in them. These trees are beginning to

bear fruit, and results are encouraging. A second gen-eration of CEPLAC cultivars, even more resistant to


Average dai ly t rading price, a djusted for inflation (year 20 00 do l l a r s)

U.S. dollars per metric ton

Million metric tons

0

.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Average dai ly t rading price (historical dollar values)

Globa l g r ind ings (beans actual ly ground for use the standard measure of demand)

Globa l p roduc tion

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Year 2000 data are provisional.Sources: FAO STAT database and the International Cocoa O rganiza tion .

0

1000

2000

30004000

5000

6000

7000

8000

9000

World Cocoa Production, Demand,and Trading Prices

and cocoa solids. Milk chocolate isan instant commercial success.

1879: The Swiss chocolate manufacturerRudolphe Lindt invents the conch, amachine for stone-grinding chocolate.Because it produces a much finer-grained,more mellow chocolate, conching soonbecomes a standard manufacturing process.

1894: Milton Hershey, already the ownerof a caramel candy business, founds theHershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylva-nia. Like Cadbury-Schweppes and Nestl,Hershey is today one of the largest choco-late manufacturers in the world.

1905: Cacao arrives in Cte dIvoire, the

country that is today the worlds biggestcocoa producer.

1911: The cocoa yield in Ghanaapproaches 40,000 tonsat the time, aworld record national harvest. Cacao, aNew World tree, has become primarily anOld World crop. Today, roughly two-thirdsof cocoa production is from Africa.


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26 WORLD WATC H November/D ecember 2001

the broom, shouldbe available soon.Simply plantingresistant trees, how-ever, is not going tosolve Bahias prob-lems. Even if thebroom is van-quished, Bahia isgoing to have a hardtime competing withAfrica in the conven-tional cocoa market.Consider the hugedisparity in the costof labor: in Bahia,farm workers gener-ally make the Brazil-ian minimum wage,which currentlyamounts to a littleover $850 per year.In C te d Ivoire, by far the wo rlds largest cocoa pro-ducer, workers are typically paid around $165 per year(assuming they actually get paid). Thats less than afifth the Brazilian wage. Planting those resistant culti-vars will push Bahias production costs even higher, atleast for the next several years. (It costs about $1,500to replant 1 hectare of cacao.) Production costs mayeventually decline if large numbers of farmers adoptthe strategy that CEPLAC currently recommends: abroom-resistant, nonorganic regime intended to pro-duce 1,500 kilograms of cocoa per hectare per year(versus around 900 kilograms per hectare on the high-er-yielding Ivoirian plantations). But even then, it ishard to see how this high-yield strategy will serve thelong-term interests of producers, who are already fac-ing low prices because the global market is floodedwith cocoa. B ulk production o f generic cocoa justdoesnt seem to be the game best suited to Bahianconditions. It would make more sense to develophigher-value products, like forest friendly chocolate,and a stronger demand for them. A comprehensiveremedy, in other words, will have to be built not just

on the farm, but in the markets and media that influ-ence the demands of consumers abroad.

The capacity for change: Bahia probably has the bestagronomic infrastructure of any cocoa-producingregion in the world. CEPLAC has nearly 40 years offieldwork and research to its credit. Its staffed byexperts with an intimate knowledge of their area andit has some 200 field extension agents. IESB hasalready developed a proven organic cocoa program.CEPLAC, IESB, the Mars Company, and professorsat a local university, the U niversidade Estadual deSanta Cruz, are all investigating polycultural agro-forestry systems in which cacao would figure as amajor component. P olyculture, the grow ing o f sever-al crops simultaneously on the same piece of land,doesnt have to be organic, but organic farmers oftenuse polyculture to reduce their vulnerability to thepests of any particular crop. Polyculture outsidecabruca is already underway to some extent; cacao issometimes interplanted with banana, for example, orrubber. Within cabruca, polyculture is trickier becausetheres less light to work with, but it should be feasi-ble to include various other shade tolerant crops, suchas the fruit- and fiber-producing palms, aai ( Euterpe

oleracea ) and piassava ( A ttalea fu ni fera ).In addition to its intellectual resources, B ahia has

World

Cte dIvoireGhana

1960

Million hectares

20001970 1980 19900

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Source: FAO STAT datab ase

Nigeria

Brazil

Cameroon

Ecuador

Dominican Republic

Equatorial Guinea

Venezuela

Mexico

Cocoa Bean Area Harvested: World and Major Growing Countries

1917: The first reports of a virulent fungaldisease called frosty pod rot emerge fromEcuador. The disease, which is currentlyconfined to northern South America andsouthern Central America, can cause a totalcollapse of the yield.

ca. 1920: In Minnesota, Frank Marsfounds the Mar-O-Bar Company, the precur-

sor of Mars, Inc., another of the worldslargest chocolate manufacturers.

1936: Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virusemerges in Ghana and spreads throughoutthe west African cocoa-producing regionduring the next two decades. The virusremains the most important pest of cacaoin Africa.

1987: Food-Tek, a food chemistry firm inNew Jersey, takes out the first patent on analtered molecular structure in cocoa butter.Food-Teks invention is the first (reasonably)edible heat-resistant chocolate. A similarinvention in the following year, by theBatelle Memorial Research Institute inSwitzerland, attracts major industry invest-ment. Heat-resistance is widely regarded as


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enormous genetic resources at its disposal, since asubstantial portion of the cacao trees native range iswithin Brazilian borders. Much of this native geneticwealth has yet to be tapped for disease resistance,fruit prod uction, and ot her useful characteristics.

Bah ian farm own ers may also be ready for change.In general, these people areor werewealthy, atleast in local terms. But at this point many of themare in debt, or without sufficient collateral for addi-tional loans. And its probably safe to say that nearlyall of them are frustrated. They have weathered pastcocoa crises (created by previous price downturns),largely by waiting them out. By and large, they havetaken that approach this time as well, but they know that beyond the witches broom, the overall trend incocoa prices is not promising. The passive strategy isbecoming less and less att ractive. Yet t he radical alter-nativeselling the farmis not a very handsomeoption either, since land values have declined greatlyin the wake of the crisis. Some farmers are movinginto other crops, such as palm heart, coffee, or evencattle, and sometimes cutting cabruca to do so. Butthere is still a general reluctance to abando n t he cropthat was once the key to prosperity. In short, Bahiancocoa growers would appear to make a good con-stituency for change: they are relatively conservative,but they are educated, influential, and increasinglyrestiveand there arent that many of them. A planthat attracts significant interest from them wouldlikely also get government attention, especially if itaddressed a basic problem for a much broader con-stituency: the need to do something for tho se 90,000unemployed farm workers.

A major ecological benefit for change now: InBahia, most of the largest surviving undisturbed for-est fragment s lie along the coast; mo st cocoa is grow nfarther inland. But the cabruca and other fragmentsin the cocoa region are well worth preserving in theirown right. Even though it is hardly pristine, cabrucaaccounts for a good deal of the remaining forest. Insouthern Bahia, roughly half the surviving canopy isin cabruca. And at least in some contexts, cabrucamay hold a lot more biodiversity than is commonly

assumed. A research project near the U na R eserve,along the coast of southern Bahia, is turning up sur-

prisingly high levels of diversity in landscapes thatinclude cabruca, undisturbed forest, and pasture.Many forest animals are apparently using nearbycabruca as a kind o f supplement t o their main habitat.In one night , for example, the U na researchers found23 bat species foraging in one cabruca stand. Thego lden-headed lion tamarin ( Leont opit hecus chr ysome- las ), an endangered primate, also uses cabruca in thisway. And in 1994, a new member of the ovenbirdfamily was discovered in cabruca: the pink-leggedgraveteiro ( tw ig-gatherer ) spends most of its timein the canopy, upside-down, foraging for insects. Thislitt le bird w as unusual enough to merit, not just a new species, but a new genus. Its classified as A cr obator - n i s fonsecai , and you can see a picture of it on thecover of this magazine. Apart from their intrinsicvalue, the cocoa farms have probably also helped pre-serve the less disturbed forests elsewhere by employ-ing people who might otherwise have invaded thoseforests in search of arable land. But current unem-ployment in the cocoa region is almost certainly put-ting additional pressure on surviving forest.

Bahia has an opportunity to reinvent cocoa. Itmay be possible to undertake a form of large-scalecocoa production that favors ecological stability atrelatively high levels of diversity, that favors reason-ably high employment, and t hat creates products thatlink consumers in distant societies with these objec-tives. H ere are three steps that, I believe, wo uld getthe transformation off t o a strong start.

1. Fi n d a way for CE PL A C, t he feder al cocoa agen cy,to buy i nt o the new agri cul tu r al par adi gm.

CEPLACs concern for the local economy wouldacquire an effective ecological complement if it wereto launch a major organic cocoa initiative. It wouldnot be necessary for the agency to abandon its supportof conventional cocoa-growing regimes, but simply tooffer growers access to in-depth expertise on organicas well. Witho ut at least an implicit endo rsement fromthe regions most important agricultural agency,

progress towards an alternative paradigm is going tobe difficult. So the new paradigm needs CEPL AC , but

key to boosting chocolate consumption inthe tropics and warm temperate regions.

1989: The cacao witches broom, a nativefungal pest of cacao in Amazonia, is identi-fied in Bahia, Brazils main cocoa-produc-ing state. Over the next decade, Braziliancocoa production drops to one-quarterits previous level. The witches broom is

currently confined to northern South Ameri-ca and Panama.

2000: In October, a British television doc-umentary ignites a debate on child slaveryin the cacao plantations of Cte dIvoire,currently the worlds main cocoa producer.According to the program, up to 40 per-cent of the chocolate that we eat may be

contaminated with slavery. Cte dIvoireofficials reject the charges; the industrypromises to investigate. (Slavery wasimportant in plantation development inboth the Old and New Worlds.)


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C EPLAC could profit from t he new paradigm as well.CEPLAC was built from a 10 percent levy on cocoaexports, and the collapse of cocoa has crippled theagency. An organic initiative could be used to attractnew funding, from international donors.

2. Begi n t o bui l d a str on ger con su mer con sti tu en cy for for est fr i endl y f ar m pr oducts.

On a global basis, the $22-billion-a-year organicsector is the fastest-growing portion of the entireagricultural economy. Evidently, more and more con -sumers are willing to pay a somewhat higher price inorder to prevent damage traditionally viewed as an external cost of productionin this case, the dam-age caused by ag ricultural chemicals. Such w illingnessis a marketing opport unity t hat should be ag gressive-ly pursued. When consumers buy such products, theyare not simply purchasing t he commo dity itself; t heyare purchasing a connectionto a way of life, to anideal, to a region or issue that they care about. Pro-ducers can improve the value of that connection byoffering consumers more to connect with . I n the caseof Bahia, cocoa could be certified as coming not justfrom organic cabruca, but from regenerating organiccabruca. I t cou ld be certified as bird friendly, sinceBahia has a very rich bird fauna, and birds havecharisma. And the certification should extend b eyondchocolate, to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics thatinclude cocoa butter, and to other organic cropsplanted in or around the cabruca. Finally, there is apossibility that could jump this type of certificationfrom niche-market status to mainstream public con-sciousness: cocoa could contribute not just to forestconservation, but to forest r estor at i on . After decadesof publicity on tropical deforestation, the idea ofcoaxing the forests back out onto degraded groundcould have a very powerful go od news appeal.That would require a third step:

3. Bu i l d an agr ofor est l i nki ng capaci ty. If t he cabruca and o ther small forest fragments in

the Bahian countryside are to survive, they must belinked: corridors of forest must be planted betweenthem, or the patches must at least be extended

to wards each o ther, where complete cont inuity is notfeasible. (Continuity is much better than a gap, but agap can be crossed by some organisms, so its still agreat improvement over isolation.) The corridorswould presumably be a varying mixture of restorednatural forest and crop-producing agroforest. Thereis no single law, policy, o r economic opportunity thatcan be invoked to link the fragmentsbut there aremany economic and legal situations that could beturned into opportunities for this kind of effort. Thecomplexity of these activities, in my view, arguesstrongly fo r establishing a single prog ram or perhaps

an independent agency whose sole mission is agro-

forest linkage. Such an agency would function as akind of local version of the grand corridor planningthat the Brazilian government has undertaken on anational basis, with the help of various domestic andforeign partners. (See The Resto ration of a H ot spotBegins, page 8, for more on corridors.) The nation-al plan is necessarily focused on the areas with thebest remaining natural fragment s. The prog ram envi-sioned here would work in an analogous way, but itwould focus on t he many lower grade areas thatare still critically important in the agg regate.

In pursuit of both its funding and its objectives,the program would need a flexible agenda. Forinstance, it should attempt to capitalize on the grow-ing concern in eastern Brazil over the need for betterwatershed management. City water supplies havedeteriorated from deforestation; much of the publicseems to understand this connection and some politi-cians have voiced an interest in repairing it.

The program should look for ways to employ asmany people as possible in forest restorat ion and ag ro-forestry. It should regard job development as a fund-ing o pportunityas something it can request fundingto do. And it should look abroad, at other environ-mental public works programs, for useful precedent.An obvious starting point would be South Africas Working for Water program, which employs about24,000 people to clear away the invasive exotic treesand shrubs that are choking off municipal water sup-plies. Working for Water has become one of SouthAfricas most effective job creation programs. PoorBahians could be working for water as wellbyplanting trees, rather than uprooting them.

It could well be objected that such proposals arejust not realistic. And indeed they arent, but that istheir virtue. After all, it is ordinary, day-to-day real-ism that generally creates the big problems. It is arefusal to be realistic, in the usual sense, that general-ly leads towards solutions. Pesticide manufacturing,for instance, is a sophisticated, $31-billion-a-yearbusiness. Very realisticbut who would havebelieved that t he farm-based craft o f organ ic growingwould become the most rapidly expanding part of t heagricultural sector? And yet it is. Our relationship

with the chocolate tree is thousands of years old andit offers us much more than can be found in thecocoa commodity brand of realism. Cocoa may helpus rejuvenate both the forests themselvesand ourrelationship to them. What is the promise in the vel-vet taste of chocolate? Food, forests, and life.

C hris Bright is senior editor o f W ORLD WATC H and asenior researcher at t he Worldw atch I nstitut e. Staffresearcher Danielle Nierenberg cont ributed researchto this article.

Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back

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