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“Look, you people like chocolate. Don’t hide it. Don’t
deny it. I get all the chocolate candy bar wrappers that you toss
out of your cars, blowing into my burrow. So if you’re going
to eat the stuff, why not find a way for it to be better for the earth,
if not for your waistline. Here is a story of how chocolate could
actually save an endangered rainforest. Not a bad way to do a good
thing. And don’t tell my friends the rabbits I told you about
this. They are still are not happy with the whole chocolate-covered
bunny thing you people are into.”
— Woodchuck
Chocolate Offers New Hope for Saving Endangered Rainforest
 Washington,
D.C.— Good news for chocolate lovers: your sweet tooth could
help save one of the world’s most endangered rainforests, the
Brazilian Atlantic Forest. In a study released today by the Worldwatch
Institute, researchers Chris Bright and Radhika Sarin outline how
cocoa—the main ingredient in chocolate—could be grown
in a way that would help restore the northern part of the Atlantic
Forest biome, while encouraging other forms of development that preserve
forest instead of destroying it.
“Cocoa has serious potential for conservation because it is
a high-value crop that can be grown under rainforest canopy,”
says Bright, the lead author of Venture
Capitalism for a Tropical Forest. “Cocoa is shade-tolerant,
so farmers don’t have to clear all their forest in order to
make a living with it.” The study argues that the Brazilian
cocoa sector is well positioned to make the most of this conservation
potential. According to Bright, Brazil could grow, manufacture, and
export mainstream chocolate products that preserve forest, boost rural
employment, and turn chocolate consumers into an international constituency
for the Atlantic Forest as a whole.
The Atlantic Forest biome extends along most of Brazil’s coast
and accounts for 13 percent of the country’s area. The biome
is considered a “biodiversity hotspot”—a global
priority for conservation—because it is both highly diverse
and highly threatened. For example, “old growth” Atlantic
Forest has been found to contain as many as 476 tree species in a
single hectare (about 2.5 acres). That’s the highest level of
tree species diversity per unit area ever recorded anywhere on Earth.
But only about 7 percent of the biome remains in its original state.
Brazil currently produces around 6 percent of the world’s cocoa,
making it the fifth largest cocoa-producing country. About 80 percent
of Brazil’s cocoa comes from the state of Bahia, in the northern
part of the Atlantic Forest biome. Most Bahian cocoa is grown in an
agroforestry system known as “cabruca,” in which the forest
overstory is thinned and underplanted with cacao trees, the little
trees that bear the cocoa beans. This system is used to some extent
in certain other cocoa-growing countries as well, but Brazil has by
far the largest “chocolate forest” in the world.
Cabruca is hardly virgin forest, but over the past several decades,
its wildlife value has become increasingly important as the natural
forest fragments have continued to disintegrate. Cabruca is now the
dominant forest type within the Bahian cocoa belt, and it provides
habitat for many rare plant and animal species.
But the cabruca itself is also degrading. Very little of Brazil’s
chocolate forest is regenerating: there are not enough forest saplings
coming up in it to replace the big trees when they eventually die.
And during the 1990s, an epidemic of a fungal cocoa disease, combined
with an extended period of low cocoa trading prices, led many farmers
to abandon production and convert at least some of their cabruca to
other uses.
The decline of the Brazilian cocoa sector was also a social disaster:
it threw some 90,000 farm laborers out of work.
Now that cocoa prices have risen and fungus-resistant cocoa varieties
are available, Bright and Sarin argue that the cabruca system should
be revived, but in a form better suited to current conditions.
“Reviving cabruca could yield substantial payoffs, both
ecologically and socially,” says Bright. “But that revival
would have to go beyond business as usual. The big opportunities here
are not in mass production of generic cocoa. They’re in the
development of new cocoa products—new ways of connecting consumers
to the forest and to the people who live there.”
The study recommends a strategy called “forest cocoa,”
which is designed to promote a set of ecological and social goals.
Its ecological aims are to ensure that the cabruca is regenerating,
to eliminate the use of disruptive agricultural chemicals, and to
contribute to forest restoration within the cocoa belt.
Its social aim is to help create a stronger—and greener—rural
economy. Forest cocoa would build employment through local processing;
it would also encourage the development of other forms of eco-commerce,
such as forest restoration and ecotourism.
Forest cocoa would have a political goal as well. By producing its
own organic, eco-friendly chocolate products, Brazil could begin the
process of transforming consumer demand for such products into an
international donor base for restoring not just cabruca, but the Atlantic
Forest as a whole.
“Brazil already has all the ingredients
it needs for this recipe except for one,” says Bright. “Forest
cocoa could really use some outside investment. As a global commodity,
chocolate is worth more than $40 billion a year. We should be able
to find the relatively modest sums necessary for developing cocoa
as an eco-business.”
Additional Resources
Online Discussion
• Chocolate
Offers New Hope for Saving Endangered Rainforest
Chris
Bright and Eduardo Athayde
December 05, 2003
— 2:00 PM EST (1900 GMT)
More information on chocolate, organics
World
Watch Magazine, November/December 2001:
• A Cacao Chronology: Critical Moments in the Relationship
Between Theobroma cacao and Homo sapiens
• The Restoration of a Hotspot Begins
• Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back
Worldwatch
Resource Center
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