Content provided in partnership with

The chocolate tree: growing cacao in the forest can provide a living to small farmers and a habitat to diverse creatures

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Robert A. Rice, Russell Greenberg

To most North Americans the word "chocolate" probably conjures visions of a fragrant, nut-studded brown slab, or a box full of small but elaborate variations on gooeyness, or one of those outrageous dark desserts with names such as "mud pie" or "death by chocolate." Few of us who savor and consume such delights think about moist, lush foliage, the shrieks of toucans and parrots, or a Maya ruler from the seventh century A.D. sipping chili-spiked cocoa froth.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

But perhaps we should. Theobroma cacao--the tree whose grant pods contain the seeds that, when roasted and then ground, become the powder that is the basis of chocolate--is an evolutionary product of the vast tropical rainforests of the New World. Indigenous peoples domesticated the tree in the northern Amazon basin and seemingly independently somewhere in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, or Belize (recent genetic work, however, suggests that the Mesoamerican domesticated stock originated in South America). To those fortunate people, the cocoa drink made from cacao was, as reflected in the genus name, indeed the "food of the gods."

Today, however, this forest tree is cultivated far from its birthplace. In 2002 more than 40 percent of the world's cacao came from Cote d'Ivoire. Ghana, Indonesia, and Nigeria together produce about 33 percent, Brazil less than 5 percent. But though well-heeled norteamericanos may be laying down a ten-dollar bill to pay for half a dozen hand-crafted chocolate delights, the world's average rate for cacao beans in 2002 was not much more than eighty cents a pound, and many farmers who grew the beans were paid far less.

Yet a look at the biology, history, ecology, and economics of the cacao tree--and the industry that has sprung up around it--shows that unlike many products of the developing world that the developed world enjoys, cacao can be a relatively benign crop. It can be grown economically on small farms, bringing individual farmers into the world's cash economy without destroying their independence and self-determination. As a shade-tolerant tree, it can also be cultivated under a canopy of larger trees already living in the tropical forest; clear-cutting is actually detrimental to a sustained crop yield. That means that cacao growing, albeit not entirely without harm to the forest ecosystem, is far less destructive than most other forms of cultivation. Preserving the canopy, in turn, helps in maintaining populations of indigenous birds and other forest animals, and in pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. Inside the wrapper of this food we have come to take for granted is a complex web of interrelating factors that ecologists are only beginning to understand.

The cacao tree grows naturally in the shaded, humid understory of lowland tropical forest, reaching heights of some twenty feet. Twenty or thirty large, gently fluted pods grow directly from the tree's trunk and branches, dangling like holiday ornaments. Each pod is between six and twelve inches long, its hue orange or reddish orange by the time it matures. Inside the pod are two or three dozen seeds--the cacao beans--surrounded by a sweet, milky-white gelatinous pulp that is the main ingredient for a South American drink.

The cacao beans themselves, which are dull brown on the outside and a striking purple within, are an unlikely resource for the dessert-hungry people of the world. A mere brush against the tongue imparts a strong and bitter flavor. The pods and their beans probably evolved as they did by taking advantage of the cravings of nonhuman primates. The sweet pulp is an attractive food, encouraging the animals to remove the pods. The beans, or seeds, however, are enriched with distasteful alkaloids, and thus are discarded wherever the pulp is consumed. The combination virtually guarantees seed dispersal.

The native cacao tree also depends on minuscule flies, attracted by the overripe pods that fall to the ground and rot around its base. The flies require large pieces of moist tropical detritus (such as rotting cacao pods) to carry on their own life cycle; while thus occupied, they pollinate the tree's small flowers, which develop into the next generation of pods. Because of that natural history, cacao is much more likely to be pollinated in a forest with a moist, messy understory than in a commercial plot cleared or raked by human tools.

Cacao has been cultivated for hundreds if not thousands of years, and so has been subjected to plenty of ad hoc horticultural experimentation. Even before European contact, cacao trees had been planted far from their natural origins, and their beans were a treasured Mesoamerican re source. By the time of contact, according to the early sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdes, the beans had become so widely cultivated that they were used as money: to acquire "gold, slaves, clothing, things to eat and everything else," Valdes wrote. Between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the heyday of Europe's colonial empires in the tropics, cacao joined coffee and rubber as crops transplanted to distant shores.

The chocolate tree: growing cacao in the forest can provide a living to small farmers and a habitat to diverse creatures

Natural History, July-August, 2003 by Robert A. Rice, Russell Greenberg

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference