Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2003

Research in Action

Research with a delicious outcome

Next time you enjoy the sensuous taste of chocolate, spare a thought for those working to ensure that the world supply of chocolate is maintained.

Among them are two botanists from La Trobe University, who are helping improve cocoa farming on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Reader in Botany, Dr Philip Keane and post doctoral fellow, Dr Peter McMahon, are half way through a $400,000 three-year Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)-financed research project to help Sulawesi cocoa growers improve production.

A federal government authority, ACIAR was created to help developing countries through sharing Australia's agricultural research expertise.

Apart from chocoholics worldwide, the greatest beneficiaries of the research will be 400,000 small farmers on Sulawesi whose output makes their island the world's third largest cocoa exporter.

'The life of small holders with a typical five hectare plot of cocoa trees on Sulawesi - and in other cocoa-growing parts of the world - is not easy,' says team leader, Dr Keane, who has been involved in cocoa research in Papua New Guinea and other places for more than three decades.

Chocolate is made from cocoa beans produced in pods formed on small trees that originated in the Upper Amazon region of South America. Mayans and Aztecs used chocolate as both food and medicine.

'Cocoa production has a history of being destroyed by virus and fungus diseases,' says Dr Keane. 'Production in Brazil, once the second largest cocoa producer in the world, was largely destroyed over the last decade by a disease called Witches' Broom.'

Extensive cocoa production began in Sulawesi in the 1980s. A trouble-free beginning allowed growers to make a good living. Two main problems, a fungal pod rot and pod-boring insect, now seriously threaten the crop. A dieback disease that Dr Keane studied in Papua New Guinea is also a potential problem.

'Basically, our project is to encourage the farmers to reduce the effects of these problems by side-grafting on to infected trees pest and disease-resistant bud wood selected locally,' Dr Keane says. 'While the old wood still produces cocoa pods, the new wood which gradually replaces the old, produces disease-resistant pods.

'This technique of local selection is possible because Sulawesi has a great diversity of cocoa trees, based on plantings of old Trinitario types from Java, Amelonado types from East Malaysia and hybrids including Upper Amazon types introduced from both Malaysia and elsewhere in Indonesia.

From these, many hybrids have emerged and some of the most promising ones are being evaluated in replicated field trials.

'This is not genetic engineering,' says Dr Keane. 'We are using natural genetic variation in a technique practiced since agriculture began 10,000 years ago, selecting from plant material that has survived natural epidemics of pests and diseases.

'Local farmers are pivotal in finding and selecting disease resistant trees from which we select the material to be budded. We are encouraging them to copy what we are doing in the field trials. By doing so, they will not only greatly reduce crop losses due to diseases but also produce better quality cocoa pods from the improved genotypes.'

The research underscores a relationship between Australia and Sulawesi going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Most Sulawesi cocoa growers are from the Macassan and Bugis groups, traditional seafaring peoples whose ships visited northern Australian shores to trade for beche-de-mer and other products.

Drs Keane and McMahon are working with Dr David Guest of the University of Melbourne, and Dr Smilja Lambert of Mars Confectionary (Australia) at Ballarat.

In Indonesia, the project is conducted by Mr Arief Iswanto and colleagues at the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute, Jember, East Java, as well as staff of the Institute of Agricultural Technology Transfer at Kendari, South-East Sulawesi, led by Dr Suhardi and Mr Abdul Wahab, with assistance from PT Effem, a Mars subsidiary in Makassar. •

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