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Chocoholics should start to worry. Unless steps are taken to protect
the cocoa gene pool, supplies could one day dry up. The cocoa tree, Theobroma
cocoa, originates from the upper Amazon basin, where wild types of the plant
are vanishing as the forests are felled. Fearing that plants with unique
genes and characteristics may be lost forever, cocoa experts have issued
an urgent appeal for funds to survey and catalogue what remains of the wild
cocoa.

‘We really don’t know what we might be losing,’ says John Spence, head
of the Cocoa Research Unit at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.
Expeditions to look for wild relatives of cocoa with useful characteristics
date back to the 1930s, when botanists were hunting for plants resistant
to witches’ broom, a serious disease on cocoa farms. The collectors took
plants from the upper Amazon basin in Peru and Ecuador to a research station
in Trinidad supported largely by the British chocolate manufacturers Cadbury,
J. S. Fry, and Rowntree.

T. cocoa is also highly susceptible to black pod, a fungal disease,
and swollen shoot, which is a viral disease. There might be genes for resistance
to these diseases in wild cocoa. But combing dense rainforest for cocoa
plants is difficult and expensive.

Those wild types that have been collected are kept at two internationally
recognised banks for cocoa genetic resources. One centre in Costa Rica specialises
in Central American cocoa types. The other, the International Cocoa Genebank
in Trinidad, specialises in cocoa types from South America. The descendant
of the centre set up by the British, the gene bank is now managed by Spence’s
research unit.

Unfortunately for cocoa researchers, preserving cocoa genes has proved
more difficult than banking genes from maize or wheat. Seeds from cereals
can be dried and stored for years at low temperatures. But the seeds inside
cocoa pods are ‘recalcitrant’: they die just weeks after being separated
from the mother tree. At the moment the only way to preserve the diversity
of cocoa plants is to grow entire trees. In Trinidad, the cocoa genebank
grows 16 trees each of around 2500 types of T. cocoa it holds.

Spence has found it difficult to attract funds for research on a colonial
cash crop which epitomises luxury. ‘Clearly preserving the genetic diversity
of food crops is more urgent on a global scale,’ he concedes. ‘The aid agencies
think the manufacturers should pay for preserving cocoa genetic resources.’
Even today the main supporter of the Trinidad gene bank apart from the Trinidad
government is the British chocolate manufacturers’ trade group.

The gene bank is now trying to create a $16 million dollar endowment
fund. The interest from the fund would pay for the centre. So far, Spence
has been disappointed by the lack of financial backing from cocoa producers.
‘The producers think that if we improve cocoa the supply will go up and
the price will go down,’ he says. ‘But that is very short-sighted, because
they could lose the whole industry if a disease wiped out the trees.’