CACAO

While serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama, I worked in many small villages where cacao, the base crop for chocolate is produced. I learned first hand the enormous effort that goes into making the chocolate that we enjoy.

CACAO PRODUCTION

The base for all your favorite chocolate treats is cacao – the fruit of the cacao tree, native to Central America, but now mostly grown in Africa on commercial mono-culture plantations. In Panama, cacao trees grow on family farms called fincas. The trees are scattered in the jungle among all the other jungle plants. The fruit is produced year-round, with two main production times tied to the rainy seasons. The family will walk the finca and harvest the fruit (or pods) as it matures. The pods are then sliced or broken open to reveal the seeds, which are the actual source of commercial cacao.

The seeds are covered in a fruity mass that tastes a bit like pineapple. The wet seeds are placed in a bucket or other container and fermented for 4 or 5 days, producing a pungent alcohol smell and melting away all the fruit from the seeds. Then the seeds are dried. Here in rural Panama, they are sun dried for 4 to 6 days (depending on weather) and rotated daily. African plantations use heated vats for a fast fermentation and large, gas powered driers to dry the seeds.

The dried pods are then mostly sold to a local cooperative or company purchasing agent in 50 kilogram bags. The agents travel directly to the rural villages and pay in cash. The coop pays about 50% more, but the family must bring the seeds to a nearby larger city and gets paid by check, which must then be cashed.

Some local villages have started producing value-added products with their cacao seeds. Peace Corps volunteers from the Small Business Development program have helped promote this effort. The seeds are roasted for about 20-30 minutes, which dries the seed shell (cascara), which is then broken open to reveal the cacao bean. The beans are then passed through a fine grinder to make cacao paste. 

These villages offer several products for sale, in addition to tourist tours of the cacao process. They sell roasted, shelled beans (called nibs), dried cacao paste and finished chocolate bars. The dried paste is sold in blocks, which is similar to Bakers Chocolate, but 100% pure vs 40% purity of the commercial product. The chocolate bars are generally made by grinding cinnamon and sugar with the beans to produce a rich dark chocolate bar.

It is estimated that for every dollar that a consumer spends on a high quality chocolate product, the grower will get only about 0.3 cents – far less for a Nestle or Hershey low cacao content bar. For each 50 kg bag, the grower will get about $80 from an agent or $115 from the coop. To earn that $115, they must harvest and open about 400 to 500 pods, remove the seeds, ferment them, dry them and transport them (by hand). If this seems like a lot of work for very little reward - IT IS !! That same bag will produce about $900 worth of pure dark chocolate bar if sold to tourists – well worth the extra effort.

The locals use some of the beans at home to make a thin hot chocolate drink, sweetened by sugar or fine corn meal. Some folks drink the fermented fruit, which looks and smells pretty nasty. I met one woman who uses the outer shell of the pod to make a fruit jam that tastes a bit like pineapple.
Random notes: Pound for pound, cacao beans have about 7 times the caffeine of coffee beans. It takes about 5 years for a tree to start producing fruit. Each tree will yield between 30 and 50 fruits per year – dependent on weather and how well the tree is maintained and overhead jungle is cleared. There are about 40-50 seeds per pod.

My earlier post about cacao production generated lots of questions about raw cacao beans. They are generally sold as "nibs" - bits of the cacao seed or bean. Like many tree nuts, they are hard to remove from the shell intact, though you might get a few in a packet of nibs. They can be eaten as is or used in hot chocolate drink or bars.

My friend Simone taught me the trick of eating them right, out of the shell. Don't try and chew or you'll get a blast of very bitter chocolate. Chocolate conveniently melts at about 90F, so just let the nibs sit in your mouth, while sliding and smearing the melted ambrosia around your mouth. The cacoa butter will coat the surfaces and enzymes will convert starches to sugar. Hold in the mouth and resist the urge to swallow as long as possible. I guarantee a whole new dark chocolate experience.

When cooking the beans/nibs, use very low heat - no more than 110F. You can add dried fruit, sugar, honey, condensed milk, nuts - whatever your imagination dictates.
The nibs are available online (Amazon has a large assortment). I suggest buying from Central / South American sources rather than the big corporate mono-culture plantations in Africa.

Cacao Economics, Panama and Fair Trade (FAIL)

My work on rural water systems in Panama takes me to the jungles that surround many communities, where families often supplement their subsistence and income with the sale of cacao beans. Seeing first-hand the extraordinary amount of work that goes into the sale of their beans for very little compensation, I’ve been pondering ways they might increase their earnings.

Fair Trade – Cacao that is certified as “Fair Trade” is said to enjoy a 15 to 20% premium in price. This would amount to about $25 extra per 50 kilo bag – the standard sales unit here. To get certified they would have to prove just a few simple practices: 1. No child labor 2. No pesticides or chemicals 3. No GMO plants. Here in Panama, #2 and #3 are a given – the cacao trees all come from other local native trees and nobody even thinks of treating trees because of cost and lack of disease. The trees here are scattered almost at random among the other trees of the rainforest jungle.

But, when I raised the child labor conversation, I was met with pure laughter. Of course the children help with harvest, drying and bagging – it’s a family affair. Besides, how else would kids learn how it’s done? Working together is quality family time. And who would watch the kids if all the adults are off working? And since cacao sale is mostly just a side-line, the extra money doesn’t seem worth the effort – unlike the African families, whose entire income is based on their cacao.

So, Fair Trade was a non-starter, even before we got to the issues of how to find a certification agent and how the beans would get to market. While there are two certified farms in Panama, total production in all of the country is less than 500 tons – about 0.025 percent of world-wide production – hardly enough to make a viable market.

Moreover, the whole Fair Trade scheme is questionable. Many industry people have doubts about how well the separate supply streams are segregated. And Africa, the majority producer of cacao, is basically set up by Nestle, Cargill and Hershey as a feudal share cropping system, where growers are given company trees to plant on the family land. Child labor infractions are said to be common for the same reasons that families give here. In addition, while the Big Three maintain that the trees they supply are not GMO, they have suspiciously high yields and disease resistance.

Value Added – This seems to be a more viable option. Indeed, several other local communities have already discovered that by selling slightly processed cacao, they can net about nine times the amount they would get from selling the raw beans. In Quebrada Cacao, they sell ½ pound pure cacao blocks for $2. The community of Rio Oeste has taken the idea even further by offering “cacao tours” and a wide variety of products – from raw nibs to finished chocolate bars – to the tourist market around Bocas. Both communities were led to their cottage industry by Peace Corps volunteers of the Small Business Development program.

But, this too requires a level of effort and organization that the families I spoke with are unwilling to expend. Perhaps in the future some other PCV or whiz-bang local entrepreneur will lead the charge. But for now, the folks here seem quite willing to stick with the status-quo and just putter along with their casual side income that traditional cacao farming provides.