“Mister Cocoa,” Using Horticulture To Save Chocolate

“I am sort of Mister Cocoa,” says Professor Paul Hadley.

If there’s one person standing between the world and a potential, devastating lack of chocolate, it’s this man.

You might have heard the world is running out of chocolate, that in 20 years there will be a global “chocolate crisis”. You might have imagined the consequential hoarding, riots, mass panic on the streets …

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Spoiler alert: it’s not that bad. But there are serious problems in the world of chocolate, and Hadley’s life’s work is a linchpin in the search for solutions.

He looks a bit like an old-school gentleman farmer, his black leather shoes splashed with mud, his woolen jacket heavy and practical.

We are in a humid greenhouse, set in the muddy corner of a field in Berkshire, and called the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre.

Occasionally the plastic sheet tubes running along the ceiling inflate and puff out warm air, and rows of lush, deep-green theobroma cacao (cocoa plants, literally “food of the Gods”) wave in the breeze.

They’re odd-looking plants, hunched, like geriatric triffids. The cocoa seed pods hang off the trunks like alien growths.

Hadley has run this centre since its inception. “I was having a beer in a pub, and someone said ‘would you be interested in doing some work on cocoa?’”

Thirty years on, the little operation he inherited from Kew Gardens is funded by the chocolate industry and the US government, run by the University of Reading and has become the UPS of international cocoa research.

Its job, in a nutshell, is to get cocoa plants out of the Americas and into plantations and research institutes around the rest of the world, while making sure that pests and diseases don’t come along for the ride.

In the past century, disease has had a “devastating effect” in the birthplace of cocoa, south and central America, Hadley says.

Two wonderfully named diseases caused havoc: witches’ broom disease and frosty pod rot. Plantations infested with these fungi can lose their entire crop. In the 1990s Brazil’s cocoa industry was decimated.

Now almost 75 per cent of the world’s cocoa grows in West Africa, with half of the rest in south-east Asia.

But the industry can’t afford just to abandon the Americas. Those jungles are a genetic goldmine of rare and unknown varieties of cocoa, some of which – alone or in combination – could solve the coming cocoa drought.

The problem is this: the world is eating more chocolate than it produces, and the chocolate deficit is getting worse every year.

Last year Barry Callebaut, the world’s biggest chocolate producer, which supplies companies such as Cadbury and Hershey, warned demand could exceed supply by a million tonnes by 2020. Ten years after that, predicted Mars and Callebaut, the deficit would be two million.

They were not the only, or the first to prophesy disaster. In 2013 there was a short panic when the price of cocoa butter in Europe spiked by 70 per cent. In 2010 John Mason of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council predicted chocolate would become “like caviar … so rare and expensive that the average Joe just won’t be able to afford it”.

Climate change isn’t helping – a dry summer in the Ivory Coast can put a huge dent in cocoa supply, and the intensive nature of cocoa harvesting (each pod must be carefully snipped from the plant, with a technique no machine has yet been able to replicate) means Ebola also hit the harvest.

Despite these problems, the world is producing more chocolate every year. However, the world is also consuming more chocolate – in some places like Asia and south-east Asia, consumption is growing by 10-20 per cent a year, and in established markets people just seem to be eating more of it.

“Demand is going up inexorably,” says Hadley. “At the moment, supply just can’t keep up.”

The industry desperately needs new cocoa varieties – plants better at resisting pests and disease, that produce more beans, that are more resilient in different environments. Most cocoa growers are subsistence farmers on tiny plots of a couple of hectares, in some of Africa’s poorest corners. They can’t afford to experiment. It’s up to the rest of the world to help.

So botanists head up the Amazon in canoes and scour the wild jungle for promising plants.

They take seeds and cuttings and send them, via gene banks in Trinidad and Costa Rica, to Hadley’s centre. About 95 per cent of the safe movement of cocoa around the world comes through the Berkshire quarantine centre.

For two years the cuttings grow here in a separate, smaller greenhouse, and are carefully screened for pests and disease (cocoa virus can lurk dormant for more than a year).

“We don’t want these pests and diseases to find their way to Ghana, or Indonesia,” says Hadley. “It would just absolutely be appalling.”

The plants then join 400 relatives in the rows of the main greenhouse, waiting for an order from research centres across the world who are cross-breeding for higher yields, better resistance to pests and diseases and larger bean size.

Dr Andrew Daymond is responsible for the day-to-day running of the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre – he’s a congenial chap, who only barely winces when I ask if what he does is “basically gardening”.

It’s horticulture, and it’s not easy. The cocoa plant is picky – it evolved to suit the climate within a few degrees of the equator and it’s sensitive to heat and cold, demanding shade and humidity. The plants hate the cold – the greenhouse never dips below 23 degrees during the day, or 19 degrees at night – and there’s a backup generator in case the power to the heaters cuts out.

They’re particularly delicate when young. “In the first year they are prone to keeling over,” Dr Daymond says.

Every month or so the centre will receive a request for a cutting – a 30cm twig, stripped of leaves, to be grafted onto root stock in Ghana, or Nigeria or Indonesia, on a mission to save chocolate as we know it.

Hadley is confident we’ll avoid “chocageddon”. “It’s a bit over-hyped,” he says.

“The world isn’t running out of cocoa beans. If the industry did nothing that gap between supply and demand would increase. But the industry is doing something. The whole cocoa community is working towards closing the gap, and I am confident that will happen.”

QUEENSLAND’S GOLDEN TICKET

Grafts from the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre have travelled as far as Australia – for use in a trial project to set up a home-grown cocoa industry.

Five different parcels of “cocoa budwood” from the Reading centre were sent to research centres in Darwin and South Johnstone in Queensland, from 1999 to 2005.

The eleven clones were used as part of an eight-year effort by state and federal governments in partnership with Cadbury Schweppes to establish cocoa plantations.

The project was set up after lobbying by Cadbury, which, a 2010 federal government report said, was “concerned about the security of future world cocoa supplies against a backdrop of rising consumption and significant risks to production in major producing countries”.

Since the 1960s there have been occasional efforts to attempt to grow cocoa in Australia, but none “stuck”.

In 2010 the Australian government published a report on the latest attempt, giving it a mixed scorecard.

Trials at Kununurra in WA and in Darwin proved disappointing – either the plants had trouble growing in the local climate or they produced too few and too small bean pods – but “acceptable yields and quality” were achieved in northern Queensland, the report said.

However, because of the small scale and the labour-intensive nature of cocoa-growing, it would need a healthy cocoa price to stay commercially viable.

As of 2010 a fledgling cocoa industry was being developed, with about 35ha of plantings about to come into production.

Cadbury had lost interest, because the economics were not suited to big enterprise, but a handful of cane growers decided to press ahead.

The following year the first chocolate made from the Queensland operation hit the market, from cocoa grown by Daintree Estates in Mossman, north of Cairns.

The company is still going – and growing – with plans to sell cocoa for local and international chocolate manufacture.