Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back.

• Author: Bright, Chris
• Position: Mata Atlantica: Endangered Biome

The forests of Bahia, in eastern Brazil, are among the most diverse in the world. But in their current state, they are too fragmented to survive over the long term. Chocolate could help restore them.

I first encountered the witches' broom on a big farm in Bahia, Brazil's chocolate state (see map, page 10). Bahia is where about 85 percent of Brazil's cocoa is grown. This farm is one of several that belong to the family of my host, Eduardo Athayde. With Eduardo at the wheel of a rental car, we were bouncing down a rutted dirt road, peering info the wet, green confusion on either side. Dense stands of cacao, the little trees that bear the chocolate fruit, packed the understory of a patchy, towering rainforest. The cacao seemed like shrubbery sprouting in a ruined cathedral. And if you glanced up towards the vault, you could travel hundreds of years into the past. You look all the way up one of those buttressed, tan or cream-colored trunks, up to an island of foliage so high overhead it makes your neck hurt, and there it is: a fragment of the ancient, shattered canopy, crowded with epiphytes--arboreal plants that look like giant pineapple tops--and dangling liana vines, and who knows what else.

But the witch was in the cacao, not the canopy. I watched the little trees for its mark--the broom--and was soon rewarded. "There!" Eduardo stopped the car so I could plunge into the shrubbery and drizzle to inspect an ailing tree. It really didn't look that bad. Clumps of tender new stems had sprouted from several branches, then wilted and turned brown. The brooms looked as though they had grown too fast, the way an over-fertilized seedling looks. And then they had died. That's all. The witch might kill the whole tree, or it might not. But either way, the tree would no longer be commercially productive--even worse, it would be a factory of infection.

The witch is the fungus Crinipellis perniciosa. A "native disease" of cacao, it lives among the wild cacao trees in the northern and western portions of the Amazon basin. Unlike Bahia, that region is part of the tree's original range. In its native forests, wild cacao doesn't crowd the understory; it grows in loose patches, here and there. And the wild plants are extremely variable in their genetic characteristics, including their susceptibility to the fungus. So a fungal spore, adrift in a sea of moist, still Amazonian air, has relatively little hope of alighting on a susceptible host.

But in the plantations of Bahia, the cacao is so dense the trees often touch each other, and they carpet thousands of hectares of the countryside. So a fungal spore, drifting in the air of a Bahian plantation, can readily find susceptible tissue--a bud or young fruit pod on any of millions of genetically vulnerable trees. If the fungus colonizes a fruit pod, the pod's lode of cocoa beans will likely be spoiled. If it colonizes a bud, then about six weeks later the infected tissue will produce a broom, a sort of cancer that diverts the tree's energy from healthy growth. The broom itself will die, and then pink, flower-like structures called basidiocarps will emerge from it. Each basidiocarp will release up to 90 million new fungal spores.

The fungus's destructive potential in the dense plantation environment has long been understood, which is why Bahia has had a quarantine for many years on the movement of cacao from Amazonia. And the quarantine worked, until May 1989, when the fungus was discovered on a Bahian cocoa farm. How it got there remains a matter of speculation but in any case, this initial outbreak was suppressed when the infected 200-hectare stand was sprayed with fungicide and burned by officials from CEPLAC (the Comissao Executiva do Plano da Lavoura Cacaueira), Brazil's premier cocoa research agency. Towards the end of the year, however, a much larger infestation was discovered on another farm, where workers had apparently cut away some of the infected trees and thrown them in nearby rivers. From that moment, any hope of avoiding an epidemic was lost. The fungus had reached out of Amazonia. It was going to swallow the prosperity of Bahia. It would become a vegetable version of the Black Death.

So much was invested in the Bahian cocoa apparatus and now it is broken. In the wake of the fungal invasion, the harvest has collapsed from its peak of nearly 400,000 tons in the late 1980s to 105,000 tons today. The local economy has gone the way of the harvest. The export value of one of those peak yields probably approached $900 million. But in 1999, cocoa exports for the whole of Brazil, as reported to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, came to only $4.9 million (both figures are in year 2000 dollars). And according to CEPLAC, some 90,000 farm workers have lost their jobs. The area in production has shrunk too, from around 600,000 hectares to perhaps 450,000 hectares today.

But none of this is even detectable in the international cocoa market. And it's easy to see why it wouldn't be, if you look through the graphs beginning on page 22, which show various aspects of that market. Cocoa is now grown throughout the tropics--it's a crop in increasingly plentiful supply. Production is expanding and the general price trend is downwards. Brazil currently produces only 4 percent of the world's cocoa, down from 24 percent in 1983. In Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, which already accounts for 42 percent of global production, is continuing to ratchet up its output on the strength of a labor system that reportedly includes child slavery, although the extent of this practice is a matter of dispute. (A future issue of WORLD WATCH will include an update on African cocoa.) In Southeast Asia, Vietnam and Malaysia are reportedly considering mass plantings of the latest, most productive cacao clones. Even if the witches' broom could be eradicated tomorrow, intense competition and low prices would seem to offer little hope to Bahia's farmers.

So perhaps the witches' broom is only the proximate cause of Bahia's troubles. Perhaps there's a kind of systemic dysfunction below the disease. After all, the fungus owes its ferocious infective power to intensive monoculture, and in Bahia, this system appears to have gone just about as far as the local economy can take it. Something has got to change. Bahia's cocoa farmers are going to have to make some decisions.

And those decisions will be a matter of global biological importance. Those huge trees dominating the cacao on Eduardo's farm, as on thousands of other Bahian farms, are part of the Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Forest, one of the most biologically diverse biomes in the world--and one of the most endangered. Less than 8 percent of the original forest remains. Because of its richness and rareness, the Atlantic Forest is considered a biodiversity "hotspot"--a top priority for global conservation. (For an overview of the Atlantic Forest biome, see "The Restoration of a Hotspot Begins," page 8.)

In Bahia, which is in the northern portion of the biome, the forest was often thinned so that cacao could be planted as an understory crop. Some 50 to 60 percent of Bahian cacao is grown in this agro-forestry system, which is known in Brazilian Portuguese as cabruca. This arrangement approximates cacao's native habitat, although it admits more light to stimulate more fruit production. But the native ecology of cacao was not what inspired farmers to extend cabruca into so much of Bahia's remaining forest. They were responding to two lessons from their own experience: (1) cacao does well in this system, and (2) cutting down immense trees is hard work. So where the objective was to produce cocoa rather than timber, they cut as little as possible. Hence cabruca, a de facto conservation system, and the reason there is still forest in places like Eduardo's farm. You could say that the fate of those giant trees is now linked to the fate of the little trees they shelter.

The $60 billion flavor

The fruit of the cacao tree is a thick-rinded pod, about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. But the pod varies a good deal in size, and in most other traits, depending on the type of cocoa being grown. Sometimes it's long and narrow, so that it looks like a miniature U.S. football, but partly deflated and covered with thick, longitudinal ridges. Sometimes it looks like a squat, warty, little melon. Sometimes it's green; sometimes it's a medley of green, yellow, and red. The pods develop directly from the tree's trunk and main branches, rather than from its peripheral growth, as with most fruit trees. This characteristic can look quite odd the first time you see it. A tree in full fruit looks like it is being attacked by a swarm of parasitic gourds.

Inside the pod is a tight, cylindrical whorl of 20 to 40 white or whitish-purple seeds, in an arrangement that looks a little like an ear of corn but with giant kernels and almost no cob. The seeds are enveloped in a sweet, white pulp. In South America, the native peoples sometimes scoop the seeds from a pod and suck off the pulp, but they spit the seeds out. Raw cocoa seeds are bitter; they don't even hint at their potential to produce one of the world's most intoxicating tastes.

Before people started moving the cacao tree around, its range probably extended from upper Amazonia into Central America, perhaps as far north as Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. In the South American part of its range, the indigenous peoples apparently never discovered the simple alchemy that will convert cocoa seeds to chocolate. But along the Gulf Coast of southern Mexico, the Olmec people were probably cultivating the tree--and maybe even producing chocolate--as early as 1000 B.C. Cacao was so important among later Mesoamerican cultures--the Maya, the Toltec, the Aztec--that its beans were used as a currency throughout the region. The consumption of chocolate--which among the Aztec, at least, appears to have been a prerogative of the...