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The chocolate tree (Theobroma cacao) probably evolved about 15,000 years ago as a wild tree in the
Amazon basin growing in the understory of the tropical rainforest. It thrived in the shade of the forest
floor and lived on the nutrients and water passed down from the plants above. By 1,000 B.C., Mesoamerican
people knew that small plantings of cacao at the edge of the rainforest, mixed in with corn, vanilla,
yucca and other food plants, would provide the highest yields of prized cacao seeds. But modern farmers
ignored that wisdom.
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Silvino Villegas, a second-generation cacao farmer, started working on the cacao finca when he was
11, and stopped going to school four years later to work there full-time. "It was all I did for 25 years.
I took over management of the 35-acre plantation when my father retired."
His traditional livelihood was destroyed by Monilia pod rot -- a fungus that decimated Costa
Rica's
chocolate exports. "The Monilia hit this particular farm about 1980," he remembers. Symptoms
included splotches of powdery white or yellow mold on the fruits.
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"We didn't know what it was, so we took the plants to the minister of agriculture. He helped identify it.
We started cutting and cutting the bad fruits and branches, and that didn't work. Then we cut some
more and burned the branches on the spot. By 1985 we pretty much stopped growing cacao here because
of the Monilia." Perversely all the cutting and burning may have helped spread the fungus
even further.
Worldwide production of raw cocoa went from 1.5 million metric tons in 1965 to 2.4 million metric tons in
1995 (an increase of more than 160 percent). But Costa Rican production fell 73 percent, from 11,000
metric tons to just 3,000 metric tons. Today the only known way to control the spread of pod rot is to
hand-pick infected pods before the fungus releases its spores.
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L I K E F O R E S T S F O R
C H O C O L A T E
Pictures: Robert McClintock/PhotoAssist (top) | Gary
Braasch/Allstock/PNI | Allen Young |
Copyright ©
1997 Discovery Communications, Inc.
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