Fighting the chocolate lover's worst nightmare
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The cocoa bean is threatened by disease.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Chocolate lovers beware: the seed of love, the cocoa bean, is threatened by disease.
It's only a matter of time before diseases like witches' broom and black pot rot endanger the global cocoa supply, said Raymond Schnell, a geneticist who presented his research on cocoa in two conferences in the United States in the week before Valentine's Day.
The witches' broom, a deadly white fungus that deforms the trees, was responsible for almost destroying Brazil's cocoa crop in the early 1990s. Brazil now imports more chocolate than it exports.
The traveling of diseases is "a very real possibility and the consequences of that would be close to catastrophic ... from the local farmers up to every chain in the chocolate industry," said Edward Allen Herre of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a Panama-based scientist who presented his research at one of the conferences.
Most cacao trees grow on small plots of land where farmers can interlace them with other crops making them economically viable. The cacao trees are an environmentally friendly crop grown only in tropical regions of the world -- about 70 percent in West Africa, 18 percent in Asia followed by 14 percent in Latin America, according to Susan Smith, spokesperson for Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
Overall production for 2004 is expected to fall 0.3 percent led in part by a decline of 2.4 percent in West Africa, said Bill Guyton, president of Virginia-based World Cocoa Foundation. The decline is due to climatic change, political turmoil and disease.
In an effort to save cacao trees, scientists from all the producing regions and the United States are collaborating to find ways to make them more resistant.
Fragile plant
The cacao plant is fragile and also susceptible to pathogens like Phytophthora, a fungus that causes the most widely spread and economically harmful disease among cocoa crops, the black pot rot.
Herre's research project in Panama found that certain fungi act as a natural shield and may eventually replace the expensive and sometimes environmentally harmful chemical fungicides.
"What we have been finding is that cocoa and trees that produce the chocolate that we all love are naturally shot through with fungi," Herre said. "The natural fungal microflora, the communities of tiny little fungi, that inhabit these plants and actually live inside the tissues, contribute to the defense of these things."
Another collaborative project among scientists in the United States, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil has identified two gene markers, or genetic patterns, in cacao plants that resist a disease specific to Latin America, the witches' broom.
Seedlings from the parents with the desirable genes are being cultivated. If they continue to resist the disease until 2009, they will prove fully resistant, said Schnell, the geneticist in Miami who works on the project.
"We don't feel that any of these things is a magic bullet by itself," he said. "But if we put all [research projects[ together ... that's probably what will provide the tolerance that we're looking for."
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
