Mark your calendar: January 1, 2020.
As this future year unfolds, the gap between how much cocoa the world wants to consume and how much it can produce will swell to 1 million metric tons, according to Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest chocolate maker. By 2030, the predicted shortfall will grow to 2 million tons. And so on.
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. Here, now, as you read these words, the world is running out of chocolate.
Last year, we again 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 disease-free but also flavorful. This emerging supervariety promises the world a steady supply of high-quality chocolate — and perhaps holds the key to how all future food should be grown.
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. The stalks aren’t as military-formation perfect as in Nebraska, but the crop is as thick as they come. Farther down the road, there are dairy cows grazing on pastureland, soaring plantations of hardwood trees and fields of cassava. Every few kilometers, there is a pineapple farm; at least once an hour, it seems, a fruit-laden truck comes whining down the road.
The one crop you won’t see is cacao, the tree whose seeds are fermented and roasted to become cocoa. Cacao used to be big here. At one time, it grew so thick there were no dairy cows or pineapples. Miguel Orozco used to raise it on this 30-acre plot planted by his grandfather, and it earned him enough money to send all seven of his children to college or university.
In 1978, a fungal disease called frosty pod was found on cacao pods along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. A year later, the disease had made its way inland, and before long, two of Orozco’s sons found pods on their plantation blighted with brown lesions covered in a white, cottony powder.
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 dozen hectares 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 rarely pause to consider that cocoa might be an exhaustible resource. Those who do generally 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 for the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, 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.
It’s possible that an ecotourist could visit a Costa Rican cacao plantation one week and another in Nigeria the next, accidentally spreading a fungal spore that could bring cocoa production to its knees. Far more likely, however, is that someone will inadvertently transport cacao pods without first checking for infection.
“We have guidelines for safe movement of germ plasm,” Guiltinan says, referring to the living tissue from which new plants can be grown, “but scientists are the only ones who follow them.”
As drought and disease threaten to decimate cacao plantations worldwide, cocoa consumption is just beginning an inexorable upward trajectory. In 2010, according to the International Cocoa Organization, the Chinese ingested 40,000 tons of cocoa; this year, the country’s appetite will nearly double, to 70,000.
Hershey Co. predicts China will be its second-largest market, after the United States, by 2017. India’s consumption has similarly escalated, from 25,000 tons in 2010 to 40,000 this year.
Despite the devastation wrought by witches’ broom, even Brazil increased its chocolate habit, from 161,000 tons in 2010 to 198,000 this year. As developing nations gather strength, so too does their appetite for chocolate.
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.
Angus Kennedy, a former editor of Kennedy’s Confection magazine, says that’s already happening. Two years ago, Cadbury shaved almost 10 percent off its Dairy Milk bar, one of Britain’s most popular treats.
The second response is more invidious: so-called agricultural improvement. Nineteenth-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus’s prediction that all of humanity would starve as the planet ran out of farmland never came to pass because, decade after decade, we’ve coaxed our crops to yield ever more bountiful harvests. From 1901 to 2012, for example, U.S. corn yields went from 18 bushels an acre to 170.
The reason chocolate hasn’t followed suit is because cacao takes so long to grow and, as a result, to improve. A corn breeder can raise three new generations of corn in a single year — three opportunities to select for desirable traits. A new cacao seedling, by comparison, won’t produce fruit for two years at the earliest, and it takes 10 years to reveal traits worth perpetuating, such as resistance to frosty pod and increased yield.
Nevertheless, the race to improve cacao is accelerating. Of the multiple newly introduced strains, the most renowned comes from Costa Rica’s cocoa-producing rival to the south, Ecuador. CCN51, as the breed is called, is resistant to witches’ broom and produces nearly seven times more beans than its traditional Ecuadorian counterpart. Unfortunately, there’s a major trade- off: taste.
The website The C-spot, which publishes flavor profiles of many varieties of cacao, describes CCN51 as “weak basal cocoa with thin fruit overlay; lead and wood shavings; astringent and acidic pulp; quite bitter.”