By: Dr. Ripudaman Singh (Special Correspondent ICN Group) & Hemant Kumar ( Agriculture Correspondent ICN Group)
There is a small growing them surplus of cocoa, but we may face shortage by 2020.
NEW DELHI: Ever since we domesticated the cocoa tree over 3,000 year ago, we have been growing them to make tastier chocolate, but in the process we have turned them vulnerable.
According to the experts, there is a small global surplus of cocoa today, but the shortage may start pinching us as soon as 2020.
People across the world just start salivating at the mention of the word, “chocolate”, but thousands of years of selective breeding have drastically created a bleak future for cocoa trees. Today the cocoa plants certainly offer tastier chocolates, but they also fall short in production due to the harmful breeding techniques by putting the prospect of our chocolate supply at great risk.
What went wrong, really?
To get to the bottom of the cause, the team led by Juan Motamayor, a geneticist at the chocolate maker Mars, has now sequenced 200 genomes of domestic and wild cocoa trees marking the first study of cocoa on such a noteworthy magnitude.
The main ingredient in chocolate is the seed of the cocoa or cacao tree (Theobroma Cacao), a native of the tropical forest in Central and South America. Today, most cocoa beans are grown in West Africa.
However, growing the cocoa trees is no cakewalk. They are prone to many diseases and become less productive with passing age.
There is a small growing them surplus of cocoa, but we may face shortage by 2020.
Mars declared that it funds Motornayor’s work to protect its business: There are challenges to cocoa as a crop. “As a chocolate company…we want to protect cocoa,” said a spokesperson from Mars.
The team found mutation which compromise productivity in many trees from different populations. These mutations were particularly pronounced in a rare kind of cocoa bean called Criollo, which has a nutty flavour and is used to make some of the most expensive chocolates
“This could be due to breeding efforts to produce cocoa that tasteless bitter. That created an accumulation of mutations that led to a loss of fitness, where these cocoa trees produce very little,” said Motamayor.
Although most chocolate are made from other beans, genetic material from Criollo is found in many of them. For example, CCN-51, a key cultivar used for breeding in Latin America, owes 22% of its ancestry to Criollo.
Research indicates that the bean’s domestication began 3,600 years ago. In line with this, pottery from the Olmec city of San Lorenzo in what is now Mexico, from 1600 to 1800 BC, has traces of theobromine- a chemical found in cocoa.
When researchers compared the genomes from today’s Criollo and other trees, they found that the domesticated Criollo had genes that are possibly associated with lower levels of chemicals, called Polyphenols. Id so, that could account for its cocoa tasting less bitter then it once did.
The study poses to be “a huge contribution to cacao genomics science”. Said Mark Guiltinan, Molecular Biologist at the Pennsylvania State University in Genetic variation will help us breed a disease-resistant plants,” he said.
How to right the wrong
Markets and Markets, a research from revealed that the estimated chocolate market is nearly over $ 100 billion per year, and the demand is ever growing. We need to bring back robustness into cocoa trees, said Kevin Folta at the University of Florida n Gainsville. The 200 genomes should permit advantageous traits from wild trees to be bred into domestic plants, he said. This task is urgent. “because the tree takes so long grow”.
This is, especially, important in West Africa, which produces around two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply. The aging West Africa population is yet another, genetic stumbling block, and is showing reduced disease resistance and lower crop yields.
“Right now, we’re fitting one variety to God knows how many landscapes, soil, water and climate regimes. It would be nice if farmers and the agriculture industries in these countries had a few different things to work with when they are plant breeding,” said Wahl, an agriculture adviser at Concern Worldwide in London.
