As Chocolate Prices Soar, Map of Genome Offers Solutions
This Valentine's Day, you might notice chocolate getting more expensive. More and more people across the world are developing a taste for it, while fewer farmers are growing cacao, the shade-loving but hard-to-grow trees that give us chocolate. The Allegheny Front's Anthony Brino reports on a possible solution.
Transcript
BRINO: Paul Jensen owns Chocolate Madness in State College, and has been following the volatile world cocoa market. Recently, the world's largest producer of cocoa, the Ivory Coast, banned exports. And last summer, a South African investor bought 240-thousand tons of cocoa beans.
JENSEN: Cocoa beans that are sitting in his warehouse. He spent over a billion dollars--that's with a "B." He sets the price. And if he sets the price sky high, then I might have to put a sign in the window that says "Unless you've got a Platinum card, don't bother coming in."
BRINO: But people are still buying chocolate, and Jensen recommends Ucutan dark chocolate from Belize. There's a good chance you can trace it back to the Criollo cacao tree. Connoisseurs rave about chocolate from this type of cocoa bean. But Criollo is one of the hardest cacao species to grow, says Siela Maximova, a Penn State University plant biologist. Sheís part of an international team that recently finished sequencing the Criollo genome. As she steps into a tropical greenhouse, she points to scores of cacao trees and seedlings that her team is propagating.
MAXIMOVA: The majority of the cocoa varieties--they need a partner to pollinate. Just like in humans, the more genes get mixed together, the hybrids or the offspring are more vigorous, more healthy and more adapted. With the Criollo, all the offspring are basically virtual clones of each other because of many, many years of inbreeding.
BRINO: Criollo is often cross pollinated with inferior varieties to cut costs, though it's still a tedious and inconsistent process. Maximova's team is fusing high tech propagation with old school cross breeding, streamlining the process of isolating beneficial genes and their physical expressions like nutrition and pathogen resistance. To explain, she holds a delicate, white cocoa flower between her fingers.
MAXIMOVA: So what we do is we take flowers from cocoa, and we introduce them in tissue culture. And we trick it basically to reprogram itself and regenerate a whole new plant from a single cell or from a group of cells. And now from one of those we can produce about 8,000 individual plants.
BRINO: Then they give those trees to farmers, who can clone them easily with grafting. Growing cocoa could be more profitable, and farmers could maintain the tropical forests that their cacao plants, and some six billion human lungs, depend on. Maximova says this is her goal.
MAXIMOVA: More and more, I've been thinking and I hope a lot of other people have been thinking about combining the three major principles: people, profits and planet together. With cocoa, we have an opportunity to combine all these three principles.
For The Allegheny Front, I'm Anthony Brino.