Dispatch 2: Local Practice

Wednesday, late morning.

Via Maxi-Taxi (our driver Mohan at the wheel) we paid a visit to the Ministry of Agriculture's local demonstration station, set on a hill overlooking a flowering garden. Behind an old tractor, a group of men sat under a large thatched pavilion, enjoying the breeze. The station chief was not around, but Mark, Siela, and Carter spoke at length with agent Davion Ali, a pony-tailed young man very knowledgeable in the local practices of growing cocoa.

The Ministry is encouraging cocoa farmers locally, Ali said, by subsidizing plant propagation — to the point that plants costing $7 TT (Trinidad dollars, about 6.1 to the U.S. dollar) are sold to farmers for $1 TT. Not surprisingly, demand for plants has jumped in the last couple of years. There is also an incentive program providing funds for labor and materials to farmers interested in rehabilitating the abandoned plantations that dot the area. Roopchand — young, strong, and full of energy and hope — has taken over one such farm. In the few years he has been at it, he has been encouraged by the increase in yield he has already realized through careful pruning and other basic measures. He is also buoyed by the consistently high price paid for cocoa. Caribbean cocoa in general and Trinidadian cocoa in particular are prized for high quality and excellent flavor, and because of some preventive breeding done decades ago, many of the cacao plants here are disease-resistant. While plants in the Bahia region of Brazil have been hit severely by Witches' Broom, to the point that Brazil has gone from one of the world's leading producers to a net importer of cocoa, Trinidad's plants have been relatively unaffected.

Ali had some other encouraging information as well. He explained a rooted cutting technique the Ministry uses in plant propagation. Cuttings are taken from old trees and planted in sand at a very low angle, close to horizontal. This positioning causes an orthotropic shoot to emerge vertically from the side (not the top) of the plant. These orthotropic shoots, themselves cut and replanted when they get large enough (it takes a couple of years), produce a plant with a truer tree structure than standard (plagiotrophic) cuttings do. They grow vertically, with a branching architecture, and unlike the more bush-like plagiotropic cuttings, they sink a taproot, vital for good nourishment and stability.

Rooted cuttings are a low-tech cloning procedure, producing plants identical to the original. The technique Ali described is not much different from one that Mark and Carter have been working on in the greenhouse back home. The ready availability here of plants propagated this way was good news to Roopchand and the team, since it means they won't have to start from scratch. It should save at least a year in the slow process of getting new, high-yield plants to maturity.