Mark your calendar: Jan. 1, 2020.
As this future year unfolds, the gap between how much cocoa the world wants to consume and how much it can produce will swell to 1 million metric tons, according to Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest chocolate maker. By 2030, the predicted shortfall will grow to 2 million tons. And so on.
Because of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future. Here, now, as you read these words, the world is running out of chocolate.
Last year, we again consumed more cocoa than we were able to produce. This year, despite an unexpected bumper crop, supply barely kept pace with the recent upswing in demand. From 1993 to 2007, the price of cocoa averaged $1,465 a ton; during the subsequent six years, the average was $2,736 – an 87 percent increase.
Chocolate lovers rarely pause to consider that cocoa might be an exhaustible resource. Those who do generally assume that the biggest threat is climate change, which is indeed expected to have severe negative consequences. According to a report prepared by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Ghana and Ivory Coast – which together produce 53 percent of the world’s cocoa – temperatures will increase by up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, intensifying the dry season and causing water shortages. The result, the report states, is that “cocoa-growing areas will decrease seriously.”
However catastrophic, the threat of drought pales in comparison with that of disease. Frosty pod colonized Costa Rica in just two years. Witches’ broom, another devastating fungus, in 1989 infiltrated the Brazilian state of Bahia, a cocoa-producing powerhouse whose yield subsequently collapsed, falling by more than half, from 300,000 tons to 130,000 tons annually, in a decade.
The world will respond to the mounting crisis in two ways. The first is that manufacturers will stretch their dwindling chocolate supplies by augmenting them with other ingredients, such as vanilla, vegetable fat and flavor chemicals. Chocolate bars will contain more nougat, nuts and other fillers. And their size will likely be reduced.
The second response is more invidious: so-called agricultural improvement. Nineteenth-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus’s prediction that all of humanity would starve as the planet ran out of farmland never came to pass because, decade after decade, we’ve coaxed our crops to yield ever more bountiful harvests. From 1901 to 2012, for example, U.S. corn yields went from 18 bushels an acre to 170.
The reason chocolate hasn’t followed suit is because cacao takes so long to grow and, as a result, to improve. A corn breeder can raise three new generations of corn in a single year – three opportunities to select for desirable traits. A new cacao seedling, by comparison, won’t produce fruit for two years at the earliest, and it takes 10 years to reveal traits worth perpetuating, such as resistance to frosty pod and increased yield.
