Dispatch 10: Cocoa Futures

The greenhouse is finished — or as near to finished as this Penn State team can make it. The roof is on (and holding steady), the misting and drip-irrigation systems are in place and working, the frames for the plant benches have been painted with brown primer. Mark has even fixed the thing in space: this evening he took a reading with a hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS). (For those who care to visit, Roopchand's greenhouse is located at 10^o 18.77' N, 61^o 04.67' W.) All that remains is to fill the propagation beds with sand and add some more shade cloth to the east end, where the morning sun slants in.

We also solved a mystery. Returning to the Rio Claro Demonstration Station, where we spoke with Davion Ali last week, we had a chance to visit with the officer in charge, Kamaldeo Maharaj. Mark mentioned the supply-and-demand imbalance of rooted cuttings up at La Reunion, where cocoa farmers were going away empty-handed. Maharaj explained that what we had seen was the result of government policy: a plan to gradually close its propagation stations and encourage private farmers to develop facilities of their own. "But the response has not been good," he said. In fact, he acknowledged, there is little incentive for farmers to take this step, since they are heavily subsidized for simply planting land in cocoa, no matter the type or quality of the seedlings they plant. "This is a shortfall of the current system," he said.

Maharaj went on to acknowledge that the cocoa industry in Trinidad is in decline. "It's not what it used to be," he said. "We need to renew. Our fields are old, our plants are old, our techniques are old." Farmers here get a much higher price for their cocoa than farmers anywhere else in the world, he said, but that's because the price is guaranteed by the government. "We need to get our yields up, our plant quality up. We can't satisfy our markets."

On the positive side, Maharaj seemed confident that the island's Cocoa Board, the governing agency, would be interested in Roopchand's greenhouse, and perhaps in providing some funding to help it succeed. Maybe Roopchand's place can someday be a model, one that will help to rejuvenate the cocoa industry in Trinidad.