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Chocolate may help preserve rain
forests
By SUSANNE QUICK
[email protected]
Guapiles, Costa Rica -
Preservation is one of the keys to a
successful museum. Keeping animal
hides safe from insect defilement,
wicking moisture from precious texts
and shielding oil paintings from
temperature extremes are daily battles
for any diligent curator.
But one Milwaukee Public Museum
researcher thinks he has found a
curiously novel way to preserve the
institution's collections: He's going
to make chocolate bars.
In so doing, he's hoping to
preserve the biological diversity of
Central American rain forests while
keeping the museum's exhibits and
mission fresh.
"If a museum doesn't evolve,
it goes extinct," said Allen
Young, senior vice president of
academic affairs at the museum.
Making a connection between candy
and conservation may sound contrived.
But according to Young, the right kind
of chocolate bar - such as the
museum's soon-to-be-released Cacao de
Vida - could help keep small farmers
employed in Costa Rica while
maintaining a native Central American
crop.
If it succeeds, the dark chocolate
candy bar could also go a long way in
conserving the forested homes of many
bird, mammal, insect and plant species
- the raw material of the museum's
collections.
"This is big for us,"
said Lisa Froemming, vice president
for external affairs and advancement
at the museum.
Museums often develop products
based on their collections - posters,
mugs and the like - but they rarely,
if ever, develop a product based on
research.
"It's the next step in
bringing our mission from research
into product," Froemming said.
And in terms of conservation and
economic impact in Costa Rica,
"We're going to turn Allen's
research into something that is so
meaningful," she said.
Young's research into understanding
how cacao grows and interacts with its
environment is being funded by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. The
chocolate-making enterprise is
supported by the museum, and it will
receive any profits from the effort.
For all the good that might come from
it, Froemming acknowledged,
"We're not doing it out of
charity."
That the museum has such an effort
launched in Costa Rica is perhaps not
coincidental. It already co-owns -
with the Riveredge Nature Center in
Newburg - the Tirimbina Rainforest
Center in the Sarapiqui region of
Costa Rica and coordinates a host of
educational projects in the country.
It may be the only public museum of
its size in the United States with
such a presence in another country.
A boon to animals
Cacao - the bean behind chocolate -
is native to the Western Hemisphere.
(Pronounced "ka-kow," it is
often referred to as cocoa in the
United States.) It originated in the
Amazon basin and was domesticated
throughout northern South America and
Central America.
Unlike Central America's big cash
crop, banana, the native cacao plant
thrives in shade. This means that
chocolate farms are often
characterized by a variety of plants
and trees: a boon to animals looking
for varied habitat.
In addition, between 75% and 90% of
the world's cacao farmers grow their
trees on a small scale, according to
the World Cocoa Foundation, a
non-profit organization funded by the
chocolate industry. Farmers plant
cacao sporadically around their small,
5- to 10-acre plots amid a jumble of
wild and agricultural plants using few
or no pesticides, fungicides or
herbicides - again, a boon to animals.
"For the most part, they can't
afford them (chemicals). So, they tend
not to use them," said Robert
Steinberg, co-owner of Scharffen
Berger Chocolate Maker, a premium
chocolate producer based in Berkeley,
Calif., and the company contracted to
produce the museum's chocolate bar.
Between 1940 and 1970, cacao was
Costa Rica's most important commercial
crop, according to the International
Cocoa Organization.
In the early 1960s, statistics from
the United Nations' Food and
Agricultural Organization show Costa
Rica exported more than 10,000 metric
tons of beans per year, making it one
of the largest suppliers in the world.
But a two-punch assault - first
from nature, then from humans - in the
late 1970s deflated, then felled the
market.
Today, chocolate is a negligible
export in Costa Rica. In 1999, only
130 metric tons of cacao beans were
exported, according to the
International Cocoa Organization.
Young, and collaborators at the
Milwaukee Public Museum and the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, are
hoping to revive the past. They'd like
to persuade Costa Rican farmers to
take on cacao again. And they're
keeping their fingers crossed that
providing a use for the cacao - in the
form of a museum candy bar - will
serve as the proverbial carrot on a
stick.
"That's the idea," Young
said.
Demise of an industry
To understand the museum's mission
in Costa Rica, it's important first to
understand why the cacao market faded
so fast.
The blight "frosty pod,"
or monilia, was first seen in western
Ecuador during the early 1920s, where
it remained isolated for 50 years.
With the creation of the trans-Andean
pipeline in the early 1970s, the
mountain barricade that had protected
eastern Ecuador and South America was
penetrated. It didn't take long for
this fungal vagabond to steal a ride,
surreptitiously hitchhiking on human
heels and then waves of wind, to new
land.
By the 1970s, the frigid grasp of
monilia had extended its grip across
northern South America and Central
America, strangling thousands of tons
of healthy, ripe football-sized cacao
pods.
The pods looked as though they'd
been suffocated under a white, shag
carpet of mold. By the late 1970s,
Costa Rica's crop had plummeted by
30%.
If this wasn't enough, West African
nations such as the Ivory Coast,
Ghana, Gambia and Nigeria were
increasing their cocoa market by
exploiting cheap labor - which some
human rights organizations and
newspaper reports suggested was akin
to slave labor. Their product was
flooding the markets.
That was a knockout blow to
countries such as Costa Rica, where
salaries were - and are -
comparatively high for a developing
nation. With Costa Ricans demanding a
higher wage than their African and
Southeast Asian rivals, chocolate from
the region couldn't be sold at a
competitive price.
"It was a combination of
things" that did the Costa Rican
market in, said Bill Guyton, president
of the World Cocoa Foundation.
"It was the economics (of
competition), the fungus coming in and
the price of land," which was
skyrocketing out of reach for most
independent, small-scale farmers.
So, farmers turned to banana. All
they had to do was tear down chunks of
forest and seed it with a monotonous
sea of elongated yellow fruits.
By the early 1990s, more than 200
square miles of the country's lowland
forest had been converted to banana,
according to Carlos Hernandez,
research director at EARTH University
in Costa Rica. While that may not
sound like a huge hunk of land, it
constitutes more than one-twelfth of
the tropical, lowland Caribbean area -
the only land suitable for banana
growth, and cacao for that matter.
For a country primarily dependent
on tourists who come to see its
wildlife and forests, razing trees for
bananas was a concern, Hernandez said.
So, in 1993, the Costa Rican
government, troubled about the
expansion of banana plantations and
the rapid rate of deforestation, got
banana producers to sign an agreement
promising "not to knock down any
more primary forest and only expand
into areas that are good for
bananas," Hernandez said.
Today, about 115 square miles of
Costa Rica's humid, lowland tropics
are used for banana. And while most of
the plantations belong to big
companies, an increasing number of
bananas are being sold by organic
cooperatives to North American and
European markets, Hernandez said.
The problem is that while growing
bananas may make financial sense, many
environmentalists, foresters and
biologists would like to ensure that
the plantations remain limited or,
better still, that the land be
converted to crops that are friendlier
to the forest and its inhabitants.
Hence, the museum's call for small
scale, sustainable cacao.
Planting the seeds
How to get farmers to turn to a
crop with such a shaky past is the
challenge facing Young and his team.
"We're trying to get them to
incorporate cacao into their farms by
growing it along with other
crops" such as mango and papaya,
said Chris Vaughan, a postdoctoral
fellow in wildlife ecology at
UW-Madison - and a member of the team.
The idea is that a variety of crops
will mean a farmer always has
something to sell - even when
chocolate prices are low.
But in order for any of this to
happen, the Milwaukee Public Museum
needed first to jump-start the market
- to essentially help create a small
system that would move bean to
chocolate to consumer.
Young turned to Hugo Hermelink, a
Dutch farmer in Costa Rica.
Hermelink's father had been
producing chocolate beans for decades
near Guapiles - a town in the lowland
banana region.
In 1993, Hermelink's father died in
an auto accident. Hermelink, who was
training as a mechanical engineer in
Holland, packed his belongings and
moved to Costa Rica.
Within a matter of years, he had
revamped his father's farm as only an
engineer could do - introducing a
pulley system to move the beans around
the 3,700 acres and updating the
bean-processing machinery.
Hermelink turned a failing,
disease-ridden cacao farm into a
self-sustaining operation, where the
beans can be grown, harvested,
shucked, fermented and processed on
the premises. He also hired 16 workers
to manage the agricultural aspects of
the plantation. Each is in charge of
two 10-acre plots. And over these
plots, they have virtual autonomy.
"Those plots are basically
their own to run," Hermelink
said.
They are responsible for pruning,
weeding, sanitation, harvesting and
general upkeep. And in return, they
are paid a handsome salary and
provided a home.
Today, the Hermelink farm is the
largest producer of cacao in the
country, Young said.
Hermelink has been very careful
about selecting and breeding cacao
trees that show heightened resistance
to frosty pod and other pathogens. And
with the hands-on care his trees
receive from his foremen, he has been
able to maintain a working and
productive plantation.
While buying cacao from Hermelink
would seem to undermine the idea of
the museum's chocolate bar - supplying
small, independent farmers with a
steady income for cacao, while
stepping away from monoculture
plantations - Young sees Hermelink as
a necessary first step in this
project.
Not only is Hermelink's farm going
to be certified as organic next month,
but if he is able to generate enough
income from the museum's bar, he'll
need to increase his supply, Young
said.
And to do that, Young hopes he'll
have to start buying beans from local
farmers - sparking a cooperative cacao
market in Costa Rica.
Already, meetings between Hermelink
and farmers up and down the Caribbean
coast of Costa Rica have begun in
anticipation of selling chocolate to
specialized niches of the North
American and European markets.
The owners of Scharffen Berger, the
California boutique company given the
job of producing and packaging the
museum's bar, are excited by the
prospects.
"I like his (Hermelink's)
social and environmental goals,"
said Steinberg, co-owner of the
premium chocolate producer. "He's
knowledgeable about the types of
cacao, the genetic backgrounds and the
process of fermentation."
And the fact that this bar is being
produced in conjunction with a museum
provides for an unprecedented
opportunity to teach people about
cacao - how it's processed and where
it comes from, Steinberg said.
"I really admire what he is
doing," Steinberg said of Young.
Cacao de Vida - literally,
"Chocolate of Life" - is
expected to be released at the end of
the year in Milwaukee Public Museum
shops (of which there are four in
Milwaukee, two in Madison and one in
Fish Creek), and museum officials are
hoping that soon after, it will appear
in specialty shops around the country.
Young envisions it wrapped in a
foil that espouses the importance of
sustainable cacao farming and educates
the public about the biology of the
cocoa tree.
Cacao "is a fascinating
organism," Young said, and he
hopes that by pleasing the taste buds
of chocolate-loving museum-goers, he
may be able to infect them with a
similar enthusiasm.
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