Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus (CSSV) has wreaked havoc on cocoa crops throughout much of West Africa and continues to inflict serious economic and human hardship in cocoa-growing countries. As part of our research and collaborative efforts to better manage and combat this disease, Mars Chocolate and ICRAF recently held a regional workshop on CSSV in Accra, Ghana.
The weeklong workshop brought together more than
With cocoa demand up, yields down and a shortage of new land to farm, cocoa research is critical to improving African, Asian and S. American cocoa farmer livelihoods through higher-quality and more productive crops.
My team and I recently participated in and helped fund a significant global research initiative that spanned multiple continents. The effort involved a dozen participating countries, industry leaders like us,
Cocoa genetic resources are kind of taken for granted in the cocoa world. Genetic resources include the wild, uncultivated, and uncollected varieties of cocoa still growing in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, the original home of cocoa as well as the large collections of cocoa varieties which have been collected and are maintained in Trinidad (ICG,T) and Costa Rica (CATIE). These relatively uncharacterised
Mars has partnered with IBM and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the sequencing of the cocoa genome and as a result IBM featured our strong partnership during their 100 year anniversary celebration.
On Thursday, June 16th IBM released a short film directed by an Academy Award winning director Davis Guggenheim called “Wild Ducks.” Following the theme of making the world a better
This is a copy of the leaflet handed out at the Chelsea Flower Show, from the University of Reading’s award winning exhibition on cocoa. Its a summary of the research supported by Mars and others at Reading on germplasm movement, climate change effects, physiology and managing pests and diseases.
Back in 2008, Mars announced plans to “unlock” the cacao genome to better understand the plant, improve its quality, and bolster its production. Mars and its partners – USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and IBM – said it wouldn’t be done until 2012. Well, three years early, help is on the way for 6.5 million cocoa farmers and the 40-50 million people who rely
