Demand for chocolate expected to outstrip supply.
Drought, disease erode cacao crop even as demand surges worldwide
The world is running out of chocolate. Because of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future, food experts say.
Last year, we consumed more cocoa than we were able to produce. This year, despite an unexpected bumper crop, supply barely kept pace with the recent upswing in demand. From 1993 to 2007, the price of cocoa averaged $1,465 a ton; during the subsequent six years, the average was $2,736 — an 87 percent increase.
The world’s most universally delectable treat has begun a journey from being very loved and very common, like beer, to being very loved and a good deal less common, like Bordeaux. Unfortunately, that is the least of the confection’s problems.
Efforts are under way to make chocolate cheap and abundant — in the process inadvertently rendering it as tasteless as today’s store-bought tomatoes, yet another food, along with chicken and strawberries, that went from flavorful to forgettable on the road to plenitude.
Hope exists, however, in the form of a brave new breed of
cacao, engineered to be not just fecund and diseasefree, but also flavorful.
In the far north of Costa Rica, just outside the town of Upala, stands a field that should unsettle anyone who enjoys chocolate. The view there is of corn — as far as the eye can see. Cacao — the tree whose seeds are fermented and roasted to become cocoa — used to be big here. Miguel Orozco once raised it on his 30-acre plot.
In 1978, a fungal disease called frosty pod was found on cacao pods along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. A year later, Orozco’s plantation was blighted with brown lesions.
For 10 years, the Orozco family waged war on frosty pod. They covered the diseased pods in oil, buried them in large pits and burned them. Eventually, there were too many rotten pods to burn, and a little more than a decade after the disease had first been discovered, Orozco and his sons took a chain saw to every cacao tree until all the land had been cleared. The family’s annual harvest of 26,000 pounds of high- quality cocoa beans — enough for more than 600,000 1.5- ounce bars of milk chocolate — was gone.
Chocolate lovers might assume that the biggest threat is climate change, which is indeed expected to have severe negative consequences. According to a report prepared by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, in Ghana and Ivory Coast — which together produce 53 percent of the world’s cocoa — temperatures will increase by up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, intensifying the dry season and causing water shortages. The result, the report states, is that “cocoa-growing areas will decrease seriously.”
However catastrophic, the threat of drought pales in comparison with that of disease. Frosty pod colonized Costa Rica in just two years. Witches’ broom, another devastating fungus, in 1989 infiltrated the Brazilian state of Bahia, a cocoa-producing powerhouse whose yield subsequently collapsed, falling by more than half, from 300,000 tons to 130,000 tons annually, in a decade.
Before witches’ broom, Brazil was the world’s second-largest exporter of cocoa. Today, it’s a net importer. Neither frosty pod nor witches’ broom have yet descended on Africa — cocoa’s undisputed breadbasket, responsible for 70 percent of the planet’s production. But Mark Guiltinan, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University specializing in cacao, believes it’s only a matter of time before someone transports cacao pods between nations without first checking for infection.
As drought and disease threaten to decimate cacao plantations worldwide, cocoa consumption is just beginning an inexorable upward trajectory. Hershey Co. predicts China will be its second-largest market, after the U.S., by 2017. India’s consumption has similarly escalated.
The world will respond to the mounting crisis in two ways. The first is that manufacturers will stretch their dwindling chocolate supplies by augmenting them with other ingredients, such as vanilla, vegetable fat and flavor chemicals. Chocolate bars will contain more nougat, nuts and other fillers. And their size will likely be reduced.
Meanwhile, the race to improve cacao is accelerating. Of the newly introduced strains, the most renowned is Ecuador’s CCN51. The breed resists witches’ broom and produces nearly seven times more beans than its traditional Ecuadorean counterpart. Unfortunately, there’s a major trade-off: taste.
But there’s hope for the flavor of chocolate. After decades spent preoccupied with disease resistance, the African cocoa industry is finally starting to take flavor seriously. The world’s single largest cocoa-producing country, Ivory Coast, is planting new hybrids called mercedes.
TCHO Chocolate Co. of Berkeley, California, which set up nine facilities in South America to teach cacao growers how to breed for flavor, opened its first lab in Africa in 2013, in partnership with the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana.
“We now Skype with cocoa farmers to talk about the way chocolate should taste,” says Brad Kintzer, TCHO’s chief chocolate officer.