Dispatch 13: The Gene Savers (Final Dispatch)

Port of Spain. Arrived here yesterday, for the last two days of our stay, and it's a good thing we came when we did.

This morning there was a general strike in Mayaro district. People protesting the lack of jobs and poor living conditions created more than 50 roadblocks with trees and burning tires, closing off traffic for most of the day. Mohan and Roopchand were stuck down there with the Maxi-Taxi, having gone south last night to get the last of our equipment.

Here, the inconvenience was minor: we had to find our own ride to our morning appointment. That was at the Cocoa Research Unit at the University of the West Indies, keepers of the International Cocoa Germplasm Collection, one of the largest repositories of cocoa varieties in the world. For some reason, "germplasm collection" made me think of seeds in a vault. So I didn't take my mosquito repellent or my boots when we left the CRU building for a "short ride" to the gene bank. Forty minutes later, after bouncing down a bone-jarring final stretch of dirt road that seemed to last an eternity, we arrived — at a vast remote tract containing innumerable plots of trees, each tree dog-tagged and groups of 16 marked with signs that read "Peru", or "Mexico," or some less recognizable combination of letters and numerals.

Some 2,500 genetic varieties of cocoa are preserved here, types from around the world, in a collection that was started in the 1920s. Our guide, plant collector Vishnarayan "Vish" Mooleedhar, has brought back a number of these specimens himself. In a quiet voice he told of the medicine men he has encountered in Belize (who travel three days into the rainforest in search of the cocoa bean of pure white), and of being arrested in Ecuador while in search of cocoa. ("Most of the stuff you carry when you're collecting looks like it could be military," he explained.) Mooledhar's specialty is the criollo variety of bean, which he has tracked back to its domestication by the Mayans.

Back at the CRU, director David Butler quickly described a full slate of projects, all centered around this vast collection: the painstaking morphological descriptions of every variety, so exhaustive that in five years only 500 varieties have been completed; the genome mapping; the screening for virus resistance, breeding compatibility, and other valuable information. And then he was out the door, headed for six weeks of research in Brazil. Roopchand and Mohan finally arrived in Port of Spain at dinner-time, after a frustrating day of trying. They brought with them the materials that Mark, Siela, and Carter will need to return to the germplasm site tomorrow and collect flower samples for tissue-culture experiments back in Pennsylvania.

That's the last thing left on the long checklist of "To dos" for this trip, a fascinating, productive, and sometimes grueling foray into a place where some of us may never come again, but all of us have made some lasting ties, as well as learning an awful lot about cocoa.

We will keep in touch — Mark and his team are eager to follow the progress of the new greenhouse over the next few years, to use it as a research base, and to see its impact on cocoa propagation in Mayaro. And all of us are hopeful that Roopchand and his family, our new friends, will reap many benefits from it, and build for themselves a sustainable and rewarding enterprise and a better way of life.

But all of this is in the future. For now, that's all from Plant without Borders in Trinidad.