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You'd really be on the spot if you were to try and find someone who doesn't like chocolate. It has been savored by humans for thousands of years, from its start in South American cultures as a high value food and drink, to Spanish friars and conquistadors who took the delicacy to Europe, and its gradual conquest of humanity to become everyone's favorite taste. Cocoa beans were considered extremely valuable, and at one point, were even used as currency for trading.
Chocolate Habitat
Chocolate is made by processing the seeds of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao). The cacao plant needs an intricate ecosystem to sustain itself. Cacao is a shade grown crop that requires a very specific set of conditions to thrive: uniform temperature, high humidity, abundant rainfall, rich soil, and wind protection. Cacao is now primarily grown in Africa, with the West African countries Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana making up more than half the world's supply. Cocoa is also grown in India, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean. The trees are grown by millions of smallholder farmers from a wide range of economic backgrounds. However, the majority earn just enough to support their families.
The trees need to be pollinated in order to bear fruit. Bees are simply too big for the flowers, the trees hence rely on smaller insects for the task, namely ceratopogonid midges. This reliance on midges however, is a double edged sword. Midges are vectors of diseases like malaria, dengue and Zika fever, which have long plagued the African continent. Farmers address this problem by using pesticides, but that also wipes out pollinators and incites biomagnification as well as pesticide resistance.
Farmers with a cocoa habit
Practices like monocropping, i.e. growing the same crop year after year on the same land with the absence of rotation, a method favored by cacao farmers, can lead to an increase in midge populations. Monocropping offers a host of benefits on an industrial scale, as the emphasis is on a single plant variety - standardized planting, streamlined mechanization, higher yield, ease of system maintenance, and efficient harvests. This sounds perfect on paper, especially for farmers struggling with financial security, but it has a cost. Monocropping reduces the economic lifespan of cacao trees, impacting the long term financial security of the farmers.
A full grown cacao tree can produce pods for well over 25 years, monocropping the plant however, can cut that time in half. Monocropping depletes soil rapidly. Unlike most forest trees, cacao is inefficient with regard to nutrient cycling, a lot of it being used to nourish the fruit. Farmers address this by using copious amounts of fertilizer, and expanding their farms into forested land. This adversely impacts climate change via increases in pesticide concentrations, greenhouse gasses, temperature et al. Monocropping also requires a lot of water and energy, which in combination with expansion, can be detrimental to local biodiversity, as only one type of crop is being grown, with nothing else to account for the preexisting flora.
Agroforestry involves practicing agriculture while enhancing existing plant and animal populations, thereby creating a more complex ecosystem. For instance, a cycle where you intercrop cacao with profitable shade trees, like fruit bearing trees, and/or timber. This enhances the health of the farm, while also increasing profits.
The additional crop diversity boosts nutrient cycling and the increased biodiversity can bring in new denizens that rank higher up in the food chain, which can consume and thereby control the midge population.
The threats of Climate Change & disease
The biggest and most persistent threat to cacao is climate change. Rising global temperatures could really upset chocolate production. Small farmers don't have a lot of options, or resources, to combat the problem. Moving their farms to higher elevations, or constructing greenhouses on existing land are expensive and unviable. Insects are cheap and effective pollinators, while hand pollination in a greenhouse would be labor intensive and expensive. Both methods would involve a considerable amount of trial and error since they’ve never been attempted before, let alone at such a scale. The increased costs would have to be borne by the consumer, which would make the final product inaccessible to many.
The other prominent threat is disease. Cacao is susceptible to numerous pathogenic fungi, but there is currently no effective solution other than manipulating all controllable factors to alter conditions such that the fungus cannot grow. Scientists at University of California, Berkeley are working on improving the plants’ pathogen resistance by enhancing its genome using the novel gene editing technology CRISPR. They hope to enhance the plants' hardiness to drier climates through the same method.
