Dispatch 12: The Malaysian Method

Virtually every person we have talked to during this trip has mentioned the name of Paul Manikchand, who raises cocoa near the town of Sangre Grande (pronounced Sandy Grandy). When at last we visited Manikchand's estate today, we found out why.

Driving onto his land is like driving onto a cocoa orchard, with perfect rows of close-order trees flanking the road on either side. Manikchand grows cocoa intensively, according to what he called the Malaysian method. On 33 acres he has planted 75,000 trees. His yields are 1,600 to 1,800 pounds per year per acre, seven or eight times the national average, and he says he's aiming at 3,000. He also gets three times the government-mandated price for his product, direct-marketing to premium chocolate makers around the world.

Manikchand in person is an imposing man, with a voice like James Earl Jones. He holds degrees in engineering and mathematics from UCLA, and returned to his native Trinidad in the late 1970s, after the California aerospace industry took its big dive. He bought land and started the farm in '92. At that time, he said, there was no one locally who could help him with practical knowledge of how to grow cocoa, so he spoke to growers around the world. His is the only high-density cocoa farm on the island, regarded as a model.

There is little room for shade trees in Manikchand's system. To get his trees to produce the way they do, he has to use more fertilizer than most cocoa farmers do. "He's really pushing his plants to the max," Mark says. Somewhat surprisingly for an innovator, Manikchand said he prefers to plant seedlings instead of clones. But his objection turns out to be pragmatic, rather than philosophical. Clones, he says, are bigger at planting time than seedlings, and so they cost him more than seedlings do — $2TT or more, when you count the extra costs of transport and labor.

Furthermore, the ones he has seen, he says, are an uncertain improvement over seed plants. "I am a businessman," he said. "I'm not interested in anything that doesn't work. But if you could prove to me that you had a plant that was orthotropic and disease-resistant, and retained good flavor, I'd pay five dollars for it."