Cocao and French Guiana

In mid-september, Jack and I visited the unique cocao farm in French Guiana near Rémire-Montjoly. We had a guided visit of the farm and the owner explained everything about the process of harvesting cocao. We even got to taste the chocolate that is made from this exclusive Guianese production site.

 Although cocao is indigenous to South America, today it is mostly grown in Africa. Europeans introduced it there in their colonies after Christopher Columbus had brought some cocao beans back with him. Currently, the world's largest exporter of the cocao bean is the Ivory Coast.

Our guide explained that we are headed straight for chocolate disaster over the next half-century. A cocao tree only produces cocoa beans for about 80 years, and Africa's cocao plantations are rapidly aging. Moreover, it takes at least ten years for a cocao tree to produce its first beans; most African planters don't plant new trees because of the high investment costs and the lack of profitabilty during the trees' maturation. Worse still, no new people are going into cocao farming in Africa because no one wants to earn nothing for a decade.

Consequently, our guide is convinced that the world is headed towards a rarefication of cocao beans and much higher costs of chocolate. This is accelerated by new markets in Asia (such as China) which are hastily opening to the joys of chocolate. Hopefully, Guiana will become a reliable production site over the next years which will also greatly boost the local economy.

Guiana has actually been producing cocao beans for centuries, since the Jesuites. Our tour started with the ruins of the old 19th century drying and processing site. (click on photos to enlarge)

Cocao beans grow on the bark of cocao trees. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of fruit produced by a single tree and it takes a large quantity of cocao beans to produce one bar of chocolate.

Our guide opened up a cocao fruit and we got to taste the raw beans inside. The coating over the beans is like a white jelly and is very sweet and pleasant. Biting into the beans, however, was a rather bitter experience.

Don't confuse cocao beans with papaya trees which also grow fruit on the bark. We saw some large papaya trees during our tour of the farm.

Our visit ended near some rocks with petroglyph inscriptions. These were done in pre-Columbian times by the Arawak Indians. Most of the petroglyphs were difficult to see as they are exposed to the elements and aren't preserved. However, we got a nice shot of this poisonous snake (the triangle-shaped head indicates it's poisonous).