World Bank invests in hunt for super-chocolate
A proposal from Bioversity International to use cutting-edge molecular biology to identify the best that traditional cacao has to offer was one of the winners in the World Bank's 2008 Development Marketplace.
- Super-cacao or run-of-the-mill? New molecular tools will provide the answer. Credit: H. Dempewolf/Bioversity International
In the world of chocolate, not all cacao varieties are created equal. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, many small growers produce crops from nondescript 'ordinary' varieties of cacao. But, like gold dust, thinly scattered through this bulk are a few 'super' varieties that offer extraordinary taste and high quality to discerning lovers of chocolate.
The problem is, while buyers know a good bean when they taste one, the growers have not known how to identify these rare and valuable cacao gems and keep them separate. If this challenge could be cracked, cacao growers would have a premium crop and consumers would have a big smile on their faces.
The World Bank recently decided to help fund the development of a solution. A proposal from Bioversity to use genetic fingerprinting to identify important cacao diversity was one of the happy winners among 22 finalists selected from 100 proposals competing in Washington DC in the World Bank's Development Marketplace 2008. This annual competition helps trawl innovative projects to find those showing the most promise for improving the lives of farmers in developing countries. And as an extra bonus, Hannes Dempewolf, the young scientist at the heart of the project, had a rare chance to explain the merits of the work direct to the World Bank President, Robert B. Zoellick. "He was impressed with the underlying 'conservation through use' philosophy," Dempewolf reported.
Project leader Jan Engels is a senior scientist at Bioversity with long experience of cacao diversity. "I am very pleased with the Bank's decision," he said. "This will encourage farmers to conserve cacao diversity for the best of reasons—because it earns them more money."
At the core of the project is an effort to develop standardized, reliable methods to identify valuable beans. The approach depends on the sequence of some DNA that is separate from the chromosomes that carry the bulk of a plant's genes. These independent DNA elements, found in organelles called plastids, are generally unique to individual varieties. Until recently it has been just too costly to carry out routine sequencing of this plastid DNA, or plastome, in order to identify cacao varieties. New science now makes it both feasible and economic.
Dempewolf is studying for a PhD at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, and is closely involved with the molecular work. "This is like DNA fingerprinting for varieties," he explained. Unlike chromosomes, plastids very rarely exchange genetic material during sexual reproduction. So the plastomes of individual varieties tend to be fixed and identifiably different from one another. The fingerprinting delivers unequivocal labelling of distinct, specific cacao varieties. In the past year it has become possible to sequence entire plastomes with the speed and reliability required to make the project work and now both UBC and the United States Department of Agriculture are contributing their extensive expertise in DNA analysis to aid the project.
In the field, the hunt for cacao 'gold dust' is to be trialled first in Trinidad and Tobago, where farmers who specialize in older, high-quality varieties routinely receive double the world price for their crop. While older is not necessarily better, cautions Engels, the exciting part of this work is the bringing together of the two highly innovative strands of cutting-edge molecular technology and participatory variety selection.
Victoria Henson-Apollonio, head of the CGIAR's Central Advisory Service for Intellectual Property, is also excited by the direction of the project. "There is a lot of interest in gourmet chocolates," she said. Discerning consumers demand single-source, sustainably-produced chocolate. In turn this drives increasing interest among commercial buyers in cocoa of proven quality from particular places, which should benefit local producers. "But only if their cacao can be authenticated," added Henson-Apollonio. "This project could give us a way to know which cacao varieties produce premium chocolate and ensure that the beans going into processing are indeed from those varieties."
This World Bank-funded project on cacao adds to Bioversity's portfolio on this valuable crop. A €500 000 project, funded by the Austrian Development Agency is helping farmers in Nicaragua to identify and process top-quality beans, linking them with buyers for chocolate gourmets in North America and Europe. And a project funded by the Common Fund for Commodities is adopting a participatory approach to cacao selection and breeding, working with farmers in 10 countries around the world (see 'New approaches to cacao breeding,' Bioversity Annual Report 2006, p. 14). For the smallholder farmers who grow 90% of the world's cacao, projects such as these offer a route to better livelihoods.
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