What next? Now threat to cacao.

Only two days after reporting to you that climate change is threatening wild coffee in its native land, now cacao is threatened in western Africa, not its native land, but an area that provides a lot of the world's chocolate, because climate change is making the area too hot.  1st coffee, now chocolate.  What next you may well ask?  Who knows?  But here is an absolute promise; this is only the beginning.  When will politicians figure out what is begining to happen?  More and more crops in more and more places will no longer be able to grow where they have been growing.  Hard to predict exactly how bad things will get, but finding viable alternatives, new places to grow displaced crops, new crops for farmers who have lost their traditional crops, is not at all easy.  When coffee and chocolate are threatened, so is civilization! 

Cost of chocolate

The time-honored, although not honorable, practice is to get someone hooked on an addictive substance by basically giving it to them free, and then once the addiction hook is set, reel them in and charge them a fortune to maintain their habit or die trying.  In general chocolate doesn't seem to fit this scenario, but like its close cousin caffeine, theobromine is an addictive stimulant.  A local chocolate maker has a semi-sweet dark chocolate containing finely ground coffee beans.  A couple of pieces of this delectable stuff gives you a real buzz, and you wonder if there should be age restrictions for buying it!  At another level, such things as chocolate come from crops in distant places, foreign countries with tropical climates, and chocolate is just taken for granted along with its affordability, so what would you pay to insure that cacao (image - cacao tree with ripe fruit) as a crop is protected and sustainable?  Well, there is a protection strategy and a price tag (visiting this link will be a good time to try out your scratch and sniff monitor).  On a world-wide basis $2 million annually is probably not too much, but you know, a couple of million here, a couple of million there, multiplied by all those other commodities people would still like to have and pretty soon you're talking real money.  Unfortunately the human race has borrowed against the future using natural resources without really paying the price for their conservation, maintenance, and sustainability.  This cost, these costs, are now going to come home to roost over the next few decades.  The free lunch is over, and things like chocolate may become pricier, a luxury.  Pay up, or go cold turkey.  HT to Agricultural Biodiversity. 

Ludicrous Flower Friday

TGIFF - Yes, nothing can lift spirits more than another wonderful flower to ponder and appreciate. One of the great things about teaching rain forest ecology are the field trips, and today's flower grows in Costa Rica. Like many tropical trees, this species is cauliflorous, the flowers sprout right out of the tree trunk, rather like a overly gaudy baubles. And of course it helps to be conspicuous in the dim light of the rain forest understory. This flower can also take you a bit of time to figure out because there seem to be more parts than typical flowers and they are arranged rather differently than typical flowers. And that's where the fun is! This is a wild species of Theobroma, literally the "drink of the gods", and the domesticated species T. cacao is our source of cocoa, chocolate. Got that? C-A-C-A-O is the plant, C-O-C-O-A is the product.