The chocolate fruit - cocoa

Chocolate starts as a yellowish fruit about twice the size of a papaya. The fruit grows pretty much anywhere on the tree, any spot on the trunk or branches is fair game, (if you are familiar with jabuticabas, same principle). The fruit is picked and the seeds are cleaned and dried for a week, the dried seeds smell and taste like chocolate. The seeds are ground and presto, you have raw chocolate, add a little milk and sugar and you are good to go. The fruit is sweet but doesn't taste anything like chocolate.



The cacao tree likes to grow in extremely humid, hot and shady conditions. The farmers plant banana trees, which are fast growing, to provide shade for the young plants. A tree reaches full production maturity in just 5 years and can be harvested twice a year.



Twenty years ago Ilheus in the north of Brazil was among the top producers of cocoa in the world until a fungus decimated the entire production. The fungus is called Vassoura de Bruxa (witch's broom) and has no known cure, the cocoa producers have had to learn to live with this plague. Once it hit the region's production was reduced to a fraction of what it had been, and now twenty years later it is no longer a profitable industry and the city of Ilheus has fallen on hard times.

Tourism is picking up in Ilheus since cruise ships started docking there. There are 2 or 3 cruise ships each week and a small tourism industry is contributing to the local economy, some of the more savvy cocoa framers who are still around cater to the passing tourists. The cocoa farmer's hospitality was impeccable and his wife made us some cocoa fruit juice and showed us her house. She has a flair for decorating and the wooden sink outside the bathrooms was a site to see. The bottom was lined with river stones and sprinkled with jasmine flowers which released their aroma as the water poured over them.


It seems to me that a threat to the world's chocolate production is a rather serious thing. If this spreads to other cocoa producers the results would be catastrophic (at least to me…) In twenty years the only solution found was a hybrid plant that has stronger resistance to the fungus. Chocolate may soon become a luxury item for the very few.