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Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back

Excerpted from November/December 2001 WORLD WATCH magazine

by Chris Bright

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© 2001, Worldwatch Institute

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Ifirst encountered the witches’ broom on a bigfarm in Bahia, Brazil’s chocolate state (see map,page 10). Bahia is where about 85 percent ofBrazil’s cocoa is grown. This farm is one of sev-

eral that belong to the family of my host, EduardoAthayde. With Eduardo at the wheel of a rental car,we were bouncing down a rutted dirt road, peeringinto the wet, green confusion on either side. Densestands of cacao, the little trees that bear the chocolatefruit, packed the understory of a patchy, toweringrainforest. The cacao seemed like shrubbery sprout-ing in a ruined cathedral. And if you glanced uptowards the vault, you could travel hundreds of yearsinto the past. You look all the way up one of thosebuttressed, tan or cream-colored trunks, up to anisland of foliage so high overhead it makes your neckhurt, and there it is: a fragment of the ancient, shat-tered canopy, crowded with epiphytes—arborealplants that look like giant pineapple tops—and dan-gling liana vines, and who knows what else.

But the witch was in the cacao, not the canopy. Iwatched the little trees for its mark—the broom—and was soon rewarded. “There!” Eduardo stoppedthe car so I could plunge into the shrubbery anddrizzle to inspect an ailing tree. It really didn’t lookthat bad. Clumps of tender new stems had sproutedfrom several branches, then wilted and turned brown.The brooms looked as though they had grown toofast, the way an over-fertilized seedling looks. Andthen they had died. That’s all. The witch might killthe whole tree, or it might not. But either way, thetree would no longer be commercially productive—even worse, it would be a factory of infection.

The witch is the fungus Crinipellis perniciosa. A“native disease” of cacao, it lives among the wild cacaotrees in the northern and western portions of theAmazon basin. Unlike Bahia, that region is part of thetree’s original range. In its native forests, wild cacaodoesn’t crowd the understory; it grows in loose patch-es, here and there. And the wild plants are extremelyvariable in their genetic characteristics, including theirsusceptibility to the fungus. So a fungal spore, adrift ina sea of moist, still Amazonian air, has relatively littlehope of alighting on a susceptible host.

But in the plantations of Bahia, the cacao is sodense the trees often touch each other, and they car-pet thousands of hectares of the countryside. So afungal spore, drifting in the air of a Bahian plantation,can readily find susceptible tissue—a bud or youngfruit pod on any of millions of genetically vulnerabletrees. If the fungus colonizes a fruit pod, the pod’slode of cocoa beans will likely be spoiled. If it colo-nizes a bud, then about six weeks later the infected tis-sue will produce a broom, a sort of cancer that divertsthe tree’s energy from healthy growth. The broomitself will die, and then pink, flower-like structurescalled basidiocarps will emerge from it. Each basidio-carp will release up to 90 million new fungal spores.

The fungus’s destructive potential in the denseplantation environment has long been understood,which is why Bahia has had a quarantine for manyyears on the movement of cacao from Amazonia.And the quarantine worked, until May 1989, whenthe fungus was discovered on a Bahian cocoa farm.How it got there remains a matter of speculation butin any case, this initial outbreak was suppressed when

WORLD•WATCH November/December 2001 17

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b y C h r i s B r i g h t

Mata Atlântica: Endangered Biome

Chocolate Could Bringthe Forest Back

The forests of Bahia, in eastern Brazil, are among the most diverse inthe world. But in their current state, they are too fragmented to survive

over the long term. Chocolate could help restore them.

the infected 200-hectare stand was sprayed with fun-gicide and burned by officials from CEPLAC (theComissão Executiva do Plano da Lavoura Cacaueira),Brazil’s 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 avegetable version of 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-zation, came to only $4.9 million (both figures are inyear 2000 dollars). And according to CEPLAC, 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 this is even detectable in the interna-tional cocoa market. And it’s easy to see why itwouldn’t 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-ics—it’s a crop in increasingly plentiful supply. Pro-duction is expanding and the general price trend isdownwards. Brazil currently produces only 4 percentof the world’s cocoa, down from 24 percent in 1983.In Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, 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 WORLD WATCH will include an updateon 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 to Bahia’s farmers.

So perhaps the witches’ broom is only the proxi-mate cause of Bahia’s troubles. Perhaps there’s 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.Bahia’s cocoa farmers are going to have to makesome decisions.

And those decisions will be a matter of global bio-logical importance. Those huge trees dominating thecacao on Eduardo’s farm, as on thousands of otherBahian farms, are part of the Mata Atlântica, orAtlantic Forest, one of the most biologically diversebiomes in the world—and 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 Hotspot 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 cabruca. This arrangement approximatescacao’s 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 Bahia’s 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.Hence cabruca, a de facto conservation system, and

18 WORLD•WATCH November/December 2001

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ca. 1000 B.C.: The tree’s earliest knownname, “kakawa,” comes into use amongthe Olmec, the people of the Mexican GulfCoast 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 cominginto cultivation among the Maya as well.

450–500: Clay chocolate-drinking vesselsbegin to appear among the grave goods ofthe Maya nobility—strong evidence thatchocolate consumption is an important status 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 is now Mexico City, annexes the richest cocoa 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

Indigenous Mesoamericanchocolate was consumed as aliquid with a thick, foamyhead, the most valued portionof the drink. This watercolor,from a 16th century bookknown as the Codex Tudela,shows an Aztec noblewomanraising foam by pouring thechocolate from one vessel toanother. Although the imageis “Europeanized,” expertsregard it as an authentic rep-resentation of Aztec life in theconquest period. The CodexTudela is in the collection ofthe Museo de América, inMadrid. Reproduced withpermission.



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

The $60 billion flavor

The 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. football, but partly deflated and coveredwith thick, longitudinal ridges. Sometimes it looks likea squat, warty, little melon. Sometimes it’s green;sometimes it’s a medley of green, yellow, and red. Thepods develop directly from the tree’s trunk and mainbranches, rather than from its peripheral growth, aswith most fruit trees. This characteristic can look quiteodd the first time you see it. A tree in full fruit lookslike it is being attacked 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 the seeds out.Raw cocoa seeds are bitter; they don’t even hint attheir potential to produce one of the world’s 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, the indigenous peo-ples apparently never discovered the simple alchemythat will convert cocoa seeds to chocolate. But alongthe Gulf Coast of southern Mexico, the Olmec peo-ple were probably cultivating the tree—and maybeeven producing chocolate—as early as 1000 B.C.Cacao was so important among later Mesoamericancultures—the Maya, the Toltec, the Aztec—that itsbeans were used as a currency throughout the region.The consumption of chocolate—which among theAztec, at least, appears to have been a prerogative ofthe wealthy—was literally a way of eating money.

The native Mesoamerican peoples consumed theirchocolate 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 substances—red pepper was a favorite addi-tion—and 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 thecocoa—the “cocoa butter”—and sometimes also byspecial foaming additives.) Mesoamerican peoplesseem to have had a substantial repertoire of choco-late-containing beverages and porridges. We knowthis, 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 gruels.

In the early 17th century, chocolate arrived in theOld World and became a favorite refreshment at theSpanish court. Over the course of the century, itspread from one European elite to another, becomingsomewhat democratized in the process—cheapenough, 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 city’s 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 chocolate does not appear tohave been sweetened. (These details are taken fromthe fascinating culinary history of chocolate, The TrueHistory of Chocolate, by Sophie and Michael Coe.)

Apart from the change 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 currency—a 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 drink—the first recorded appearance of cocoa inthe Old World.

1560: The earliest known introduction of cacao into Asia: the tree is brought to the 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 ofCameroon. 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 “dutched”(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 Emperors of Chocolate, Joël GlennBrenner 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 theirown; Brenner mentions one that has the flavor of rot-ten fish. The bean’s chemical complexity is one of thereasons why you don’t find bars of artificial chocolateat the local market. (Carob, 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 “mouth feel” that ischaracteristic of chocolate. And since cocoa butter isnot readily absorbed by the human body, this is not afat that is likely to make you fat.

But while substitution is not a likely development,adulteration is common. Cocoa is a relatively expen-sive ingredient—relative, that is, to sugar or vegetableoil. So it’s 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 butter isoften replaced by cheaper fats, such as lecithin orpalm oil, which are also easier to work with when

manufacturing chocolate coatings. The proportion ofcocoa 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 theother 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 companies—a trend that is typical ofprocessed foods in general. (See “Where Have All theFarmers Gone?” September/October 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 Candy Business magazine,the ten largest primary processors of cocoa nowaccount for 67 percent of the world’s ground beans;that figure is projected to rise to 75 percent by theend of the decade. Candy Business reports that threeintermediate processors (Barry Callebaut, ADMCocoa, and Blommer Chocolate) now control about55 percent of the world’s “industrial chocolate”(chocolate that has yet to be processed into a finishedproduct). The retail level is dominated by six multi-nationals: Hershey, Mars, Philip Morris (which ownsKraft-Jacobs-Suchard-Côte d’Or), Nestlé, Cadbury-Schweppes, and Ferrero; in 1998, according to theEuropean Fair Trade Association, these six companiescontrolled about 80 percent of the retail market.

Fruit of the shade

Chocolate 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 Príncipe, south of Bioko.

1600–1650: 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: London’s first chocolate houseopens.

1659: In France, David Chalious is grant-ed a royal monopoly on the production ofchocolate, 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


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forests have conferred upon humanity, there is a linesomewhere for chocolate—well below the entries forcarbon storage, presumably, or hydrological stability,but it’s there. A pleasant but rather trivial gift of theforest—as 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 benefit 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 vagueand conflicting, but it’s likely that the average annu-al loss currently exceeds 130,000 square kilometers—an area nearly the size of Greece. (This estimatecomes from the World Resources Institute PilotAnalysis of Global Ecosystems, or PAGE project,which was released last year.) And that’s 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.

Despite all the attention 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 to be pretty simple: putthe most valuable remaining forests behind parkboundaries. But even when those boundaries areenforced—and frequently they aren’t—the areasenclosed are not usually large enough to sustain thefull range of ecosystem processes over the long term.The standard alternative is “sustainable forest manage-ment” (SFM), which attempts to make the forests paytheir 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 Conservation Internationalargues that SFM is not economically competitive withconventional logging practices—and 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 timberyield 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 logging 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, 1996–2000

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

Côte d’Ivoire

1,200,000 1,300,000

225,000

125,000

Côte d’Ivoire

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: FAOSTAT database <apps.fao.org>, and CEPLAC for year 2000 Brazil figures.

production of cocoa on the Caribbeanisland of Martinique.

1700–1720: In London, chocolate houseseclipse coffeehouses and taverns as centersfor amusement, business, and politicaldebate.

1727: A major blight devastates

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

1746: French attempts to break the Spanish dominance of cocoa productionbring cacao to the state Bahia, in Brazil(well south of the tree’s 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-tion—an area about the size of Ireland. Virtually allof this area was once tropical rainforest and in a gooddeal of it, the forest was obliterated for the expresspurpose of growing cocoa. And yet, the arrival ofcocoa has not always caused the complete dissolutionof forest; plantation conditions vary greatly. Cacao issometimes grown on cleared ground, and in full sunonce the young trees are established. (The more lightit receives, the more productive a tree is likely to be,at least over the short term. That’s the advantage ofgrowing in full sun; the disadvantage is that the treeis more prone to stress—from drying, for example—so its productive life may be shorter.) But becausecacao is adapted to shade, it’s commonly maintainedunder some sort of loose canopy, either a thinnednative forest or a tree plantation.

This shade tolerance is a promising asset. Cocoa isone of those 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. In 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,it’s 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, it’s 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 fashionedinto a tool for conservation, it would appear to be atool of considerable strategic importance.

But clearly, business as usual is not going toaccomplish this transformation. A “forest friendly”cocoa 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 be:

Organic, that is, grown without artificial fertilizeror pesticides. Organic production avoids the damagedone to soils, waterways, and forest by pesticides andsynthetic fertilizer.

Fair-traded, 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

Côte d’Ivoire

Malaysia

Cameroon

Nigeria

Indonesia

Ghana

Brazil

Ecuador

Colombia

Dominican Rep.

Côte d’Ivoire

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: FAOSTAT database <apps.fao.org>.

Variation in Export Tonnage in the Ten LargestCocoa-Producing Countries, 1995–99

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 ofthe 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.

1850–1860: 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


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

And finally, shade-grown under native, regenerat-ing forest. (Of course, only forests that have alreadybeen substantially altered should be used for shadecultivation; cacao should no longer be planted intoundisturbed forest.) Bahia’s cabruca system alreadypartly meets this need, but unlike standard cabruca, areally ecological cocoa would have to allow forcanopy regeneration—that is, instead of managingthe understory purely for cacao, forest saplings wouldhave to be allowed to emerge, to replace the canopytrees when they eventually die.

There is strong precedent for the shade criterion inthe cabruca system, and “fair trade” is essentially just acommon-sense labor right. (That doesn’t make it easyto achieve, but at least it’s not hard to understand.)It’s the first item, organic production, that can be thetoughest sell. Many farmers seem to have a hard timebelieving that large-scale organic production is possi-ble, and it is true that the transition to organic can betough. It usually takes several years to learn the skillsof organic growing and to build the system’s resist-ance to pests. Organic certification, through an inde-

pendent organization or sometimes through a govern-ment program, is the key to receiving the higher pricethat organic products generally command, but thattakes time too. It’s 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. Consider the organic cocoa program run bythe Bahian environmental group IESB (Instituto deEstudos Sócio-Ambientais do Sul da Bahia). As ofAugust 2001, the 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 the total. A separate dis-tribution system has been set up for the harvest: it’ssold 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, the range being largely a function of variationin soil fertility. That might not sound very encourag-ing until you look at the bottom line. Because organ-ic systems don’t use expensive agrochemicals, the

undisturbed forest. The borer remainscacao’s 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 world’s 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 HenriNestlé and the chocolate manufacturerDaniel Peter find a way to mix chocolate

with milk—an objective that had frustratedchocolate afficionados for centuries. Toovercome the incompatibility between thetwo substances, they use a low-fat form of chocolate (cocoa powder), and a low-water form of milk (condensed milk—an earlier Nestlé invention). The mixture is then enriched with additional cocoa butter

20

Côte d’Ivoire

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

Côte d’Ivoire

Variation in Export Value in the Ten LargestCocoa-Producing Countries, 1995–99

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: FAOSTAT database <apps.fao.org> (historical dollar values have been converted).

production costs are usually much lower, 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, “boutiquechocolate” 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;that’s 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 it’s justthe beginning, and it may turn out to be—relativelyspeaking—the easy part. Here’s what will almost cer-tainly be the hard part: a truly ecological cocoa willhave to be a force for forest continuity. In their pres-ent state, the cabruca stands and the 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 other words, are thegene banks from which the future forests must grow.

Reinventing cocoa

“Monoculture can be a very successful way ofgrowing crops,” says Martin Aitken, who runs theMars company’s 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 the world to

launch a large-scale effort to develop a forest-friendlycocoa. The need for change, the capacity for change,and a major ecological benefit for change—all 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 tobear fruit, and results are encouraging. A second gen-eration of CEPLAC cultivars, even more resistant to


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Average daily tradingprice, adjusted for inflation(year 2000 dollars)

U.S. dollars per metric ton

Million metric tons

0

.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Average daily trading price(historical dollar values)

Global grindings (beansactually ground for use—the standard measure ofdemand)

Global production

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Year 2000 data are provisional.Sources: FAOSTAT database <apps.fao.org> andthe International Cocoa Organization <www.icco.org>.

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

7000

8000

9000

World Cocoa Production, Demand, and Trading Prices

and cocoa solids. Milk chocolate is an 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 Nestlé,Hershey is today one of the largest choco-late manufacturers in the world.

1905: Cacao arrives in Côte d’Ivoire, the

country that is today the world’s biggestcocoa producer.

1911: The cocoa yield in Ghanaapproaches 40,000 tons—at 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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the broom, shouldbe available soon.Simply plantingresistant trees, how-ever, is not going tosolve Bahia’s 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 Côte d’Ivoire, by far the world’s largest cocoa pro-ducer, workers are typically paid around $165 per year(assuming they actually get paid). That’s less than afifth the Brazilian wage. Planting those resistant culti-vars will push Bahia’s 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. Bulk production of “generic cocoa” justdoesn’t 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 juston 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. It’s 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 Universidade Estadual deSanta Cruz, are all investigating polycultural agro-forestry systems in which cacao would figure as amajor component. Polyculture, the growing of sever-al crops simultaneously on the same piece of land,doesn’t 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 becausethere’s 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, açai (Euterpeoleracea) and piassava (Attalea funifera).

In addition to its intellectual resources, Bahia has

World

Côte d’IvoireGhana

1960

Million hectares

20001970 1980 19900

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Source: FAOSTAT database <apps.fao.org>

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 world’slargest 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 cacao in Africa.

1987: Food-Tek, a food chemistry firm inNew Jersey, takes out the first patent on analtered molecular structure in cocoa butter.Food-Tek’s 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 tree’s native range iswithin Brazilian borders. Much of this native geneticwealth has yet to be tapped for disease resistance,fruit production, and other useful characteristics.

Bahian farm owners may also be ready for change.In general, these people are—or were—wealthy, atleast in local terms. But at this point many of themare in debt, or without sufficient collateral for addi-tional loans. And it’s 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 knowthat beyond the witches’ broom, the overall trend incocoa prices is not promising. The passive strategy isbecoming less and less attractive. Yet the radical alter-native—selling the farm—is 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 abandon the 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 increasinglyrestive—and there aren’t 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 those 90,000unemployed farm workers.

A major ecological benefit for change now: InBahia, most of the largest surviving undisturbed for-est fragments lie along the coast; most cocoa is grownfarther 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 commonlyassumed. A research project near the Una Reserve,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 of supplement to their main habitat.In one night, for example, the Una researchers found23 bat species foraging in one cabruca stand. Thegolden-headed lion tamarin (Leontopithecus chrysome-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 (“twig-gatherer”) spends most of its timein the canopy, upside-down, foraging for insects. Thislittle bird was unusual enough to merit, not just a newspecies, but a new genus. It’s classified as Acrobator-nis 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 that creates products thatlink consumers in distant societies with these objec-tives. Here are three steps that, I believe, would getthe transformation off to a strong start.

1. Find a way for CEPLAC, the federal cocoa agency,to buy into the new agricultural paradigm.

CEPLAC’s 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. Without at least an implicit endorsement fromthe region’s most important agricultural agency,progress towards an alternative paradigm is going tobe difficult. So the new paradigm needs CEPLAC, 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, Brazil’s 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 Côte d’Ivoire,currently the world’s main cocoa producer.According to the program, “up to 40 per-cent of the chocolate that we eat may be

contaminated with slavery.” Côte d’Ivoireofficials reject the charges; the industrypromises to investigate. (Slavery wasimportant in plantation development in both the Old and New Worlds.)


CEPLAC could profit from the 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. Begin to build a stronger consumer constituencyfor “forest friendly” farm products.

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 production—in this case, the dam-age caused by agricultural chemicals. Such willingnessis a marketing opportunity that should be aggressive-ly pursued. When consumers buy such products, theyare not simply purchasing the commodity itself; theyare purchasing a connection—to 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. In the caseof Bahia, cocoa could be certified as coming not justfrom organic cabruca, but from regenerating organiccabruca. It could be certified as “bird friendly,” sinceBahia has a very rich bird fauna, and birds havecharisma. And the certification should extend beyondchocolate, 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 restoration. After decadesof publicity on tropical deforestation, the idea ofcoaxing the forests back out onto degraded groundcould have a very powerful “good news” appeal.That would require a third step:

3. Build an “agroforest linking capacity.”If the cabruca and other 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 extendedtowards each other, where complete continuity is notfeasible. (Continuity is much better than a gap, but agap can be crossed by some organisms, so it’s still agreat improvement over isolation.) The corridorswould presumably be a varying mixture of restorednatural forest and crop-producing agroforest. Thereis no single law, policy, or economic opportunity thatcan be invoked to link the fragments—but there aremany economic and legal situations that could beturned into opportunities for this kind of effort. Thecomplexity of these activities, in my view, arguesstrongly for establishing a single program or perhapsan 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 Restoration of a HotspotBegins,” page 8, for more on corridors.) The nation-al plan is necessarily focused on the areas with thebest remaining natural fragments. The program envi-sioned here would work in an analogous way, but itwould focus on the many “lower grade” areas thatare still critically important in the aggregate.

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 restoration and agro-forestry. It should regard job development as a fund-ing opportunity—as 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 Africa’s“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 SouthAfrica’s most effective job creation programs. PoorBahians could be “working for water” as well—byplanting trees, rather than uprooting them.

It could well be objected that such proposals arejust not realistic. And indeed they aren’t, 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 realistic—but who would havebelieved that the farm-based craft of organic growingwould become the most rapidly expanding part of theagricultural sector? And yet it is. Our relationshipwith 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 themselves—and ourrelationship to them. What is the promise in the vel-vet taste of chocolate? Food, forests, and life.

Chris Bright is senior editor of WORLD WATCH and asenior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. Staffresearcher Danielle Nierenberg contributed researchto this article.

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