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
As many of us know, millions of small scale farmers in West Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia depend on cocoa for their household incomes and livelihoods. But is there a link between cocoa farming and food security? In our opinion, the answer is “yes” for several reasons.
First, as a perennial tree crop, good cocoa cultivation fosters crop diversity and the integration of
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
