People eat 3 billion pounds of chocolate every year. Chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao. But despite chocolate's popularity in the United States and Europe, the cacao plant is in trouble. This is due to current agricultural and non-fair trade practices, according to botanist Frank Almeda, senior curator at the California Academy of Sciences.
The most common way of growing cacao is in a monoculture, the same way that corn is grown, which makes plants much more susceptible to a plethora of diseases and pest infestations, says Dr Almeda. Making things worse, cacao farmers make less than one dollar a day, so cultivating cacao isn't even economically feasible, so farmers are abandoning their cacao plantations.
But there are solutions: using sustainable agricultural practices and enacting Fair Trade agreements can be useful for protecting the plants and the farmers. And now there's a third way to protect the cacao plant as well: research. In 2010, the complete genome of the cacao plant was published and made freely accessible so researchers around the world can begin learning more about this plant (doi:10.1038/ng.736):
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11 January 2012 10:28AM
It may not be economically feasible for them, but there must be more efficient / cheaper producers out there producing it at that price. Supply and demand... if they abandon their farms and supply falls, the price will naturally rise.
11 January 2012 11:17AM
@cram: of course, free market is the solution to everything... until the last drop of water, or oil, or farmland is used, then we will really look around and say: now what?
Money is not everything: it is economically unfeasible to cultivate anything in Europe, let's import all our apples from China, then (at high costs for the environment, as we are doing with a lot of other goods). Then the reminbi goes up and we starve! well done!
Some planning is needed: free market tuna fishing has lead to its almost complete extinction (and even if we stop fishing now it will take decades to replenish the stocks), we can't continue to treat the planet as an unlimited resource, as free market fanatics are advocating, with the results we see every day.
11 January 2012 2:05PM
this is the tragedy of the commons.
11 January 2012 3:51PM
The dynamics of supply and demand only work in ideal situations where the demanders / consumers would have direct influence on the suppliers. In reality, there is a myriad of middlemen and others in between - distributors, producers, retailers, and of course speculators, like the famous Amsterdam cacao trader who bought half of the world's annual cacao supply and just sat on it until the price went up. There are many artificial barriers between the idealistic laws of demand & supply in our society.