Cocoa Around the World

Cocoa, chocolate’s key ingredient, grows only in the humid tropics, where 70 percent of the world crop is grown by small farmers like Roopchand Baschk. Unfortunately, Theobroma cacao, the cocoa tree, is not easy to grow. Plant diseases like Witches’ Broom and Black Pod destroy 40 percent of the potential crop each year, Guiltinan notes. Even among healthy plants, yields are highly uneven. Because there has not been much breeding done, Guiltinan says, a small percentage of plants produces over 50 percent of the annual yield. “There are 5-6 billion cocoa plants in the world,” he adds. “The large majority of them are aging and will need to be replaced in the next 20 years.”

The Penn State program is aimed at using cutting-edge biotechnology to aid and accelerate cocoa-plant improvement. This effort, it is hoped, will have important benefits for cocoa growers in developing countries, and also for Pennsylvania’s $5-billion-dollar chocolate industry. (Pennsylvania is the largest chocolate-manufacturing state in the U.S., producing 1.2 billion pounds per year of the sweet stuff, or 38.6 percent of all U.S. chocolate. Some 12 percent of Pennsylvania milk production, 1.3 million pounds per day, is also used in making chocolate.)

Over the past few years, Guiltinan and his team have developed a suite of new propagation systems, including a process for cloning high-yield plants, a micropropagation technique, and a low-tech system for producing rooted cuttings that farmers can practice in the field. “We’re trying to integrate all these systems,” Guiltinan says. Currently, they are field-testing the techniques. The overall goals, Guiltinan says, are to increase and stabilize cocoa production on the world market, to improve the economic status of small farmers and their cocoa-producing countries, and to protect rainforest habitat by making cocoa a more stable crop and so reducing the incentive for farmers to switch to more environmentally damaging, and less-sustainable, alternatives.