April 2009


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Cocoa was never king in the Caribbean in the way that sugar, with its enormous plantations and masses of slave labourers, once was. Yet local cocoa history is one with a far nobler pedigree.

Ever since the first Spaniards planted the Criollo variety in 1525, and then later the Forastero variety obtained via Venezuela when the Criollo was destroyed in 1727 by what history records as “a blast,” cocoa seemed to develop a special love for this land and it virtually nurtured itself into a hybrid that naturally selected the best qualities of both original stocks into one magnificently structured Trinitario.

So superior was this hybrid that its international stature grew rapidly, and by the early 1800s, Trinidad and Tobago was producing 20% of the world’s cocoa, with only Venezuela and Ecuador ahead of it. What made it such a classic?

The Criollo is full of flavour and the Forastero is hardy and vigorous, says Dr Darin Sukha, a research fellow at the Cocoa Research Unit (CRU) of The University of the West Indies (UWI). “Trinitario combines the best of both,” and is versatile in cacao breeding programmes because of their “hybrid vigour.”

With this superb strain the cocoa industry took off, with mainly medium and small-holding farmers owning and running their estates, and between 1866 and 1920 it dominated the economy.

But everything was about to change.

By then West African nations were producing vast quantities of cocoa, flooding the market. This was followed by the economic depression in the 1920s and increasing sugar prices globally. Locally, the biggest blow came from Witches’ Broom disease in 1928 which hurt the farmers and this was exacerbated when the fledgling petroleum industry began to attract agricultural labour.

Cocoa had established its economic importance, so although production declined, the Cocoa Board of Trinidad and Tobago was set up to try to revive the industry, but it continued slumping further as holdings grew even smaller and labourers, scarcer.

Cocoa lore reveres the rescue story of how Dr F.J. Pound undertook an exhaustive research survey in T&T between 1930 and 1935 and expeditions to Ecuador and the Upper Amazon between 1937 and 1942 to find genotypes resistant to Witches’ Broom disease.

This is where The University of the West Indies came in. People forget that its original incarnation was as the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, and most don’t know that given the prominence of cocoa to the economy of T&T, in 1930, a five-year cocoa research scheme had started, and by 1955 the Regional Research Centre was set up, leading to the establishment of the Cocoa Research Unit in 1963.

Dr Pound’s extensive survey had resulted in the Imperial College Selections planted in the San Juan Estate, Gran Couva, and his expeditions had yielded a collection of germplasm (trees of particular cacao types) planted primarily at Marper Farm, Manzanilla. For years too, the CRU had been conserving cacao germplasm, but they had been planted at various locations around the country.

By 1980, lack of resources and the threat of genetic erosion from competing land use meant that something had to be done urgently. Recognising the international importance of the collections, the European Development Fund provided the resources for all the little collections to be brought together at one properly managed and equipped site, and so the International Cocoa Genebank, Trinidad (ICG, T) was established between 1982 and 1994.

Set up at Centeno at the University Cocoa Research Station, the priceless collection includes 2,300 accessions representing the four major cacao groups (Refractario is the fourth) and clones are added as they become available.

This genebank, managed by the CRU, has been designated by Bioversity International as a “Universal Collection,” one of two such cacao repositories in the public domain.

Old plantation trees, Imperial College Selection (ICS) clones, have been replaced on many farms by newer commercial varieties (Trinidad Selected Hybrids) produced by the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources (MALMR) through the breeding programme pioneered by the late W.E. Freeman. These hybrids have increased resistance to diseases and favourable agronomic traits. The Ministry of Agriculture has considered quality as one of the selection criteria in its breeding programme and its TSH selections and their progenies have been made available to farmers. All of the commercial and superior TSH clones distributed to farmers have also been subjected to sensory analysis at the Cocoa Research Unit.