The cacao tree, once native to the equatorial American forest, has some exotic habits for a plant. Slender and shrubby, cacao has adapted to the shifting shadows of the understory and the life of an underling close to the damp, leaf-littered forest floor. Its large, glum leaves droop down, away from the sun. Cacao doesn't flower, as most plants do, at the tips of its outer and uppermost branches. Instead, its sweet white buds hang from the trunk and along a few fat branches, popping out of patches of bark called cushions, which form where leaves drop off. They're tiny, these flowers. Yet once pollinated by midges, no-see-ums that flit in the leafy detritus below, they'll make pulp-filled pods almost the size of rugby balls. The big, colorful, exuberant pods flop around the tree's trunk and dangle from its branches in a shameless display of ripeness—low-hanging fruit for forest animals that eat the juicy, satin-white pulp inside and disperse its bitter-tasting seeds, the magic beans. Somehow, more than 2,000 years ago, ancient humans in Mesoamerica— the Maya or, more likely, the Olmec Indians before them— cottoned on to the secret of these beans. If you scoop them from the pod with their pulp, let them ferment and dry in the sun, then roast them over a gentle fire, something extraordinary happens. They become chocolaty. And if you then grind and press the beans, which are half cocoa butter or more, you'll obtain a rich, crumbly, chestnut-brown paste— chocolate at its most pure and simple. The Maya and the Aztecs revered this chocolate, which they frothed up with water and spices into bracing concoctions. It was edible treasure, offered up to their gods, imbibed by warrior-priests and nobles, used as money and hoarded like gold. Long after Spanish explorers introduced the beverage to Europe in the 16th century, chocolate retained an aura of aristocratic, cultish luxury. In 1753, in his Species Plantarum, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus gave the cacao tree genus the name Theobroma, which means "food of the gods." Nowadays, especially in the United States and Western Europe, many of us eat like gods. In the last 200 years, an eye blink in chocolate's history, the bean has been thoroughly democratized— transformed from an elite drink into ubiquitous candy bars, cocoa powders, bonbons, and confections. Indeed, chocolate is becoming more popular worldwide, with new markets opening in Eastern Europe and Asia, including China. And that's both good news and bad. Because while farmers are producing record numbers of cacao beans— more than 3 million tons in the fiscal year 1999-2000, a whole hill of beans— that's not enough, some researchers worry, to keep pace with global demand. Cacao faces not only dwindling habitats but also the threat of devastating diseases. Has chocolate become a victim of its own success? Is it in trouble? One of the worriers is Philippe Petithuguenin, head of the cacao program at the Center for International Cooperation in Development-Oriented Agricultural Research (CIRAD) based in Montpellier, France. At a recent seminar in the Dominican Republic, he displayed a map of the world, sweeping a laser pointer across its midsection to show where cacao grows— on a narrow band within 18 degrees north and south of the equator. In the four centuries since the Spanish first happened upon cacao, it's been planted all around this hot, humid, tropical belt— from South America and the Caribbean to West Africa, east Asia, and Pacific islands like New Guinea and Vanuatu. Today 70 percent of all chocolate beans come from West Africa and central Africa, said Petithuguenin, making circles with his pointer around Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. And in many parts of Africa and other cacao-producing regions, growers practice so-called pioneer farming. They strip patches of forest of all but the tallest canopy trees and then put in cacao, using temporary plantings of banana to shade the cacao while it's young. With luck, groves like this may produce annual yields of 50 to 60 pods per tree for 25 to 30 years. But eventually pests, pathogens, and soil exhaustion take their toll, and yields diminish. Then the growers move on and clear a new forest patch— unless farmers of other crops get there first. "You cannot keep cutting tropical forest, because the forest itself is endangered," said Petithuguenin. "World demand for chocolate increases by 3 percent a year on average. With a lack of land for new plantings in tropical forests, how do you meet that?"
On plantations the slender cacao tree grows about 20 feet high and bears 50 to 60 pods each year. While the mature pods of some varieties remain green, the pods of other varieties, such as the trinitario shown here, will become red, orange, purple, or yellow as they ripen. Photographed at Manickchand's Estates in Trinidad.
