Entry: Robert Peck, World Cocoa Foundation

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the department of Huila in Colombia with Bernardo Saenz (Executive Director of Colombia’s National Cocoa Council), Juan Carlos Arroyave and Alberto Agudelo (from the World Cocoa Foundation’s member company Casa Luker) and Ricardo Mejia (from the World Cocoa Foundation’s member company Compañía Nacional de Chocolates). The World Cocoa Foundation and our two member companies are funding training activities through the National Cocoa Council in this region. I was warned to be prepared to travel to a valley which is suffering from a severe drought and where average temperatures easily surpass 110 F (43 C). Huila, located in the south-west of the country, has traditionally been known for its role as a rice growing region (using flood irrigation), its oil exploration fields, and more recently for aquaculture initiatives and the production of specialty coffees in the higher altitudes of the Andean mountain range. Cocoa has played an important role on a local scale, but poor fermentation practices and the presence of monilia (frosty pod rot) have severely affected yields and farm incomes.

Photo: Omar holds a cocoa pod infected with monilia (left) and a healthy pod (right).

I would like to share with you the story of a farmer I met nearby the municipality of Rivera. Omar is 73 years old and for the past 9 years has lived with his wife on a 4-hectare (9.8-acre) farm. When he purchased the farm, it was generating almost no income and the cocoa trees had been neglected, reaching over 15 feet in height and producing only a few pods per year. Omar has tried growing other crops (tobacco and passion fruit), but low prices and the lack of market opportunities made these not a sustainable option. Omar began receiving technical assistance from Casa Luker two years ago, and his farm has been selected as a demonstration site for training that the World Cocoa Foundation is co-funding on better post-harvest practices. Reducing the crop height, continual pruning, removal of infected pods, grafting and irrigation are some of the practices that he has implemented. What were the results?

In 2006-2007, he produced 330 Kg/ha resulting in an estimated net profit of 646,500 Colombian pesos. In the following two years, Omar’s cocoa production continued to increase; in 2007-2008, he produced 557 Kg/ha resulting in an estimated net profit of 913,480 Colombian pesos, and in 2008-2009 he produced 1,400 Kg/ha leading to an estimated net profit of 3,872,000 Colombian pesos.

Photo: A grafted seedling on Omar’s farm.

Omar is definitely a success story. Due to the amount of work he needs to invest into his farm, he has had to hire neighbors to help him with the agricultural practices that he has adopted. He is fortunate to have enough supply of water on his farm, which in the last year had been critical for his crops to thrive despite the dry season. The incidence of monilia in his crop is nowadays less than 5%, producing a positive effect on his bottom line. I am hopeful that next time I visit Omar, he will have finished grafting his unproductive cocoa trees, his timber trees will be a few feet higher and hopefully his neighbors have also made similar progress because Omar’s success is evident.

Entry: Bill Guyton, World Cocoa Foundation

In 1986, a consortium of chocolate manufacturing companies and The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) established the Penn State Endowed Program to support improvements in cocoa production through research on Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree. This program operates at PSU with revenues from an endowment, funded by World Cocoa Foundation member companies. Additional contributions are also made by PSU, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other sources.

Over the past decade alone, the program has supported eight Ph.D. graduates and nearly 30 undergraduates. Graduates have gone on to work in government, academics and the private sector. Additionally, the program has welcomed six visiting scientists from cocoa-producing countries over the last four years.

The goals of the Penn State Endowment Program are:

- To stabilize and regionally diversify cocoa production
- To promote increased cocoa production proportional to demand
- To improve economic status of cacao farmers and producing countries
- To protect rainforest habitat and associated species through promotion of sustainable and profitable cacao
production systems

This is accomplished through the identification of elite cacao germplasm, propagation systems and technology transfer to cocoa farmers. The program is under the excellent leadership of Dr. Mark Guiltinan. For more information on the program, please visit: http://guiltinanlab.cas.psu.edu/Research/Cocoa/cocoa.htm.


Penn State Endowment Program faculty and students

I have the opportunity to visit Penn State University each fall, for an annual review of the program. It is encouraging to learn about the accomplishments of the program and the collaborations the PSU team has formed with researchers in cocoa-producing countries. Some of these achievements include the development of vegetative propagation methods that can be used in combination to achieve a large and rapid multiplication of cacao plants from single elite trees including in vitro tissue culture. The PSU program is also helping to identify ways of reducing disease losses on cocoa farms, as highlighted in one of our past blogs by PSU doctoral graduate, Rachel Melnick.

The World Cocoa Foundation is pleased to support the PSU cocoa research endowment with our member companies and thank Dr. Mark Guiltinan, Siela Maximova, the faculty and students who have made the program a success.

Entry: USDA/ARS Colleagues and Bill Guyton, World Cocoa Foundation

Through the Cocoa Borlaug Fellowship Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Foreign Agricultural Service and the World Cocoa Foundation have supported the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana’s breeding program. In 2008, the program supported cocoa breeder Abu Dadzie to complete a fellowship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS) in Miami. The Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG) then supported him to continue his stay into mid-2009. In August/September 2009, USDA/ARS Miami supported Kathleen Kelley to travel to Ghana to provide training to CRIG’s laboratory technicians. Below is an excerpt from the report on her work.

A problem facing cacao breeders is the potential for misidentification of the clones used to produce hybrid seedlings through mislabeling or errors in clonal propagation. A recently developed genetic test, the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assay, can identify such mislabeling. Two significant advantages of the SNP assay over the currently more commonly used microsatellite genetic marker assay are that SNPs can be reliably assayed without expensive electrophoretic equipment and that the SNP assay results in an unambiguous genotype requiring no further post-assay analysis as is the case with microsatellites. The SNP assay is a small first step to making reliable genotyping available in cocoa producing countries.

In August 2009, the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG) acquired a fluorescent plate reader and the probes and primers necessary to do SNP assays of cocoa plants. Performing the assays, however, requires some technical expertise. The training provided at the installation of the plate reader consisted of a PowerPoint presentation by the installer on the potential uses of the equipment. As the technicians in the laboratory were unfamiliar with both the equipment and the specialized SNP assay that the equipment was for, additional training was necessary. Dr. David Kuhn, one of the molecular biologists at the USDA-ARS Subtropical Horticulture Research Station (SHRS) lab involved in the cocoa genotyping project, suggested that someone familiar with both the techniques and with the Ghanaian work environment be sent to Ghana to train the laboratory technicians. Kathleen Kelley was chosen for this job. Kathleen is currently a graduate student in Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and recently returned from two years (2006-8) teaching secondary school science in Ghana in the Peace Corps. After being trained in the SNP assay at the USDA station in Miami, FL, Kathleen returned to Ghana for a month to teach the CRIG staff the procedures to quantify the amount of DNA and subsequently run SNP assays on their cocoa samples. The extended stay was designed to assure that the operators became completely comfortable with the theory and operation of the plate reader and the assays that they would be performing, as well as to allow for any delays from equipment malfunction or difficulty in shipping.

DNA Quantification
Over the course of the month, Kathleen trained the permanent technicians at the CRIG Molecular Biology laboratory in two assays. The first was a simple quantification protocol that measured the amount of DNA in an extracted sample by binding a fluorescent SYBRGreen dye to the DNA and comparing the fluorescence to a standard curve. After the practice gained in making a satisfactory standard curve, however, the group had few problems getting decent results in the SYBRGreen assay and figuring the volumes of sample needed to do the polymerase chain reactions (PCR) that are part of the SNP procedure. The CRIG lab anticipates being able to quantify DNA for cocoa and all the other plant species involved in their research.

SNP Assays
The standard laboratory procedure for genetic analysis is a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of DNA fragments isolated from individuals of interest, followed by agarose gel electrophoresis of the PCR products and comparison of electrophoretic banding patterns among individuals. This procedure can take upwards of an hour and frequently gives uncertain results. The SNP assay in which Kathleen was training the laboratory technicians completely eliminated the agarose gel stage and substituted, instead, a two-minute fluorescence reading on the plate reader before and after PCR. Because the PCR reaction was quite robust and the samples were classified qualitatively according to the differences in their pre-and post-reads, careful mixing and pipetting were not as much of a challenge as they were in the DNA quantification, where the samples were compared to an external standard curve. Problems were encountered when samples failed to amplify enough in the PCR to give a fluorescence signal that allowed the technicians to definitively say whether the sample was homozygous or heterozygous at that allele. However, because the fluorescence read took only two minutes and was completely non-destructive, the solution to this problem was that if a sample failed to amplify, it was simply put through another round of PCR, and the readings on the sample were retaken. This process allowed the technicians to genotype samples that they were not able to assign the first time. This solution would not have been possible with an agarose gel procedure; in addition to the time cost, agarose gels would render the sample useless for any further analysis.

Equipment in DNA analysis lab

Uses for the SNP Assay
The SNP assays are very powerful tools for genotyping individuals. An example of the data that the new assays can now provide CRIG researchers and plant breeders came from samples that the technicians were using for training. They were given five samples of the PA 150 clone included in the CRIG clonal stock. The genotypes for four of the samples of that clone were the same at each SNP tested. One sample, however, was consistently different from the other four. Either this sample had been mislabeled in the collection, or, more seriously, a tree that CRIG was using in its breeding program was not what the breeders believed it to be. Kathleen and the technicians were able to draw this conclusion just by looking at the results of the first test; running subsequent SNP assays that used other probes and primers simply confirmed what they already suspected. In this instance, the assay showed that something was wrong because the unusual sample was compared to other samples in the same sample set that were theoretically genetically identical. As time goes by, however, CRIG will build up a database of SNP genotypes for all of their clones, so they will be able to compare a sample with their records to see if the sample is what they expect it to be. The assay will also be used to identify clones in the seed gardens, and to make sure that crosses have genotypes consistent with the DNA of the parents.

Entry: Meg Young, World Cocoa Foundation

World Cocoa Foundation’s ECHOES program (Empowering Cocoa Households with Opportunities and Education Solutions) works to provide the tools and learning environments youth and young adults need to thrive in cocoa farming communities. One innovative component of this program has been to equip our beneficiaries with community learning centers enabled with information and communications technology. These centers provide teachers access to technology and resources that help them create and distribute education materials while improving their own knowledge base.

The spotlight story below presented by our ECHOES implementing partner Winrock International highlights the efforts of Mr. Tapé Jules Ségniblé, who used the center to create and distribute study guides to augment the limited classroom time he had with his students. We look forward to hearing many other stories similar to his, in which other determined teachers, students, and community members turn these centers into local hubs of education and development.

Evelyne, a student of Mr.Ségniblé's, practices her math with her new learning materials

Spotlight on Zoukougbeu: Teachers Use Community Learning Centers to Improve Student Math Skills
December 2009

The conflict in Côte d’Ivoire has impacted the country’s education system, including funding for schools and regular payment of salaries - issues which often lead to teacher union strikes. As a result, the academic calendar in schools outside of Abidjan has been shortened. Most schools, where ECHOES is implemented are effectively open in mid-December or January, and close around June, giving students approximately six months of schooling each year, instead of the traditional nine and a half. Consequently, teachers often find it difficult to complete their curricula in time for national exams, and instead offer night classes, photocopy texts, or help students to form study groups to learn the rest of the information on their own. Some students are able to cope with learning like this, but many others find it difficult to understand topics never taught in class but tested on national graduation exams.

Mr. Tapé Jules Ségniblé, Winrock Project Shadow Teacher and Math teacher, found his own solution to this challenge and capitalized on the recently completed Community Learning Center at Zoukougbeu High School. Summarizing his own teaching documents and revising his lesson plans, Mr. Ségniblé created a learning document for his 3eme (final year) junior secondary school students. This document responds to their specific needs. It conforms to the official program for 2009-2010 and explains things in such a way for them to improve on their own. It can’t replace a teacher, but it is a complementary learning material. For those who want to learn more, it offers advice on how to approach a math problem so that the students are armed and ready for their national exams. It familiarizes the students with all the subjects, and teaches them to self-evaluate their performance and perfect their math skills. First, it brings to the attention of the student, the key concept to learn, invites the student to practice its application, references the student’s text book, and shows detailed steps on how to complete the exercise.


Mr. Ségniblé revising his learning document in the Zoukougbeu Learning Center

“I have wanted to make a document like this for about five years, but never could find the technical support to get it out to all my students. Our students here can’t afford text books on their own, so I wasn’t able to afford my idea before. Since we got the Learning Center, I thought I could take advantage of the equipment to produce the document. For my [teaching] colleagues, this center really serves as an information bank to inspire us to help our students achieve on tests and exams.”-- Mr. Tapé Jules Ségniblé, Winrock Project Shadow Teacher and Zoukougbeu Math teacher

A student who has used the learning support discussed how it has affected her performance:

“My name is Evelyne Patricia Yoro and I’m in class 3emeB2. I got the document from Mr. Ségniblé because it’s really detailed and helps those of us who aren’t so good at understand[ing] better the exercise. The document really is presented well, with lots of illustrations and figures. It helps me learn the methodology first for approaching a problem and then the different ways of solving it.”

For Mr. Ségniblé and other teachers using the Community Learning Center at Zoukougbeu, this opportunity has been the chance for them to test their computer literacy. In learning to use the computer, they are also learning how to become better teachers and inspire their students.

Entry: David Noyes, World Cocoa Foundation

On March 26 a team from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Office of Acquisition and Assistance in Washington, D.C. visited communities participating in the World Cocoa Foundation's ECHOES program in the Western Region of Ghana. ECHOES, which began in 2007, was extended for an additional two years with new funding from USAID and World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) member companies. I joined the team on their visit to Nkonya and the Watico teacher training college in Sefwi Wiawso. After a few brief introductions, we set off for Nkonya where we were met by Bernice, the Winrock field agent based in Nkonya. We met in front of the recently completed ICT-enabled community resource center (ICT stands for information and communications technology) and the newly-renovated Junior High School classrooms. Bernice gave us a quick summary of the work that she and ECHOES partners from IFESH and World Education have been carrying out in Nkonya:

• in-school and out-of-school agriculture and life skills training,
• adult literacy training,
• teacher training,
• family support scholarships,
• classroom refurbishment, and
• the ICT resource center.

A member of the USAID team with out-of-school youth program graduates

After this introduction, we moved on to meet the large group from the community that had assembled to greet the visitors from Washington, D.C. Community leaders, teachers, students, and others from the community were all seated under the large tree just behind the new resource center. The team from USAID was quite surprised to see such a large welcoming committee! After taking our seats, we were welcomed to Nkonya with a short speech by a female student from the 7th grade class who has also been participating in the ECHOES agriculture club. Agriculture club members learn practical aspects of cocoa and vegetable farming, as well as other skills such as public speaking and debate. Prior to ECHOES, it would be very difficult to find a young female student in Nkonya who would have the courage to speak before such a large crowd. The agriculture club performed a choreographed dance routine before we moved to formal introductions. I was given the opportunity to speak about the ECHOES project and thank the community for their enthusiastic reception and for all the work they have done to improve education in the community. We then gave the team from USAID a chance to address the crowd as well. They expressed their appreciation for the warm welcome and they said they were happy to see the impact that USAID funding was having in the community. They also expressed the hope to continue working together in the future.

We had a few more exchanges with the communities members, including a word from the chief, thanking USAID and ECHOES for all the support they have brought to Nkonya, and then moved on to observe some of the results of the project. We stopped by the ICT-enabled resource center, the Junior High School classrooms where students demonstrated what they have been learning in agriculture, and the school demonstration plot. At the demonstration plot, we were joined by a graduate from the out-of-school youth agricultural livelihoods program under the first phase of ECHOES. In the second phase of ECHOES, a new group of out-of-school youth will be trained in improved cocoa and food crop farming. However this new group of youth, with the support of the Winrock field agent, will be trained by graduates such as the one that joined us at the demonstration plot. The youth explained to us how to correctly plant cocoa, including the proper tree separation, the types of trees to use for permanent shade, and leguminous trees for improving the soil. We had a few more stops along the way back to the school and then it was time to head back.

We made a brief stop by the office of the district director of education for the Sefwi Wiawso district. The district director has been a strong supporter of ECHOES, and told the team from USAID that he hopes to work with ECHOES partners to see how they might replicate the project themselves in other communities in the district. We finished the visit with a stop by the Watico Teacher Training College where IFESH volunteers are working together with the principal and other instructors to bring improved teaching abilities to pre-service and in-service teachers and administrators.

Before the team moved on to their next destination, we sat down to a brief meal. I asked them of their impressions from the visit. Overall, they were very impressed by how involved the entire community was in the project and the level of engagement people there seemed to have. I agreed and noted that community involvement has been one of the key features of the ECHOES project. We have found that by involving the entire community from the beginning, we can make the project not only more successful, but ensure long-term sustainability as well.

Entry: Virginia Sopyla, World Cocoa Foundation

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to accompany two Liberian Cocoa Borlaug Fellows on an educational tour of Ghana. Musu Flomo is an alumna of the program who is now working with the World Cocoa Foundation to develop training materials for Liberian farmers on quality, the supply chain and sensory analysis through funding from ACDI/VOCA’s Livelihood Improvement for Farming Enterprises (LIFE) Project in Liberia. Michael Titoe, a newly-selected fellow, works for the Liberian Ministry of Agriculture where he chairs the Cocoa Sub-Sector Working Group and is working on developing policy for Liberia’s cocoa sector. Also joining us was Michael Wilcox, a professor at the University of Tennessee who served as Musu’s mentor during her fellowship and is continuing to advise her on her new assignment.

Musu Flomo (right) discusses drying methods with farmers in Tweapeasie.

Developing the cocoa sector has become a priority for Liberia as a part of its larger agricultural development strategy. Currently, production is low compared to other countries in the region – approximately 7,000 metric tons – and most of the cocoa produced is of poor quality. Increasing yields and improving quality will require action at both the farm and policy levels. Because Ghana is well-known for producing quality cocoa, we felt that a study tour of Ghana could help these two fellows to generate ideas for developing the sector in Liberia.

Thanks to the generous support of the Ghana Cocoa Board and our member companies, we learned about Ghana’s quality control system from the farm level through the point of export. Our tour began at the Ghana Cocoa Board headquarters where we learned about the Board’s structure and role in the cocoa sector. Next, we traveled to Takoradi, the main cocoa port, where we observed quality control in practice – sampling of bags being delivered to the port and prepared for shipment, residue testing, and storage of beans prior to shipment.

We visited the cocoa-growing community of Tweapeasie in the southern part of the Ashanti Region where we learned about farmers’ post-harvest practices to maintain quality. The community is participating in the Sustainable Tree Crops Program and completed farmer field school training last year. They showed us their community nursery where they are producing cocoa and shade-tree seedlings, as well as a demonstration plot where they are learning about intercropping newly-planted cocoa with food crops such as cassava and plantain. Farmer access to planting material is a major issue in Liberia, and it was interesting to see how this group of farmers was using material from the Cocoa Board’s Seed Production Unit to develop their own nursery.

Through visits to depots operated by World Cocoa Foundation member companies Armajaro Ghana Ltd. and Olam Ghana Ltd, we learned about the operations of licensed buying companies – how they purchase cocoa, manage warehouses, and check for quality. Next, we visited WCF-member companies Barry Callebaut and Cargill, both of which are operating processing facilities in Ghana. There we toured the facilities and learned about the process of transforming cocoa beans into semi-finished products, such as cocoa liquor, cocoa powder and cocoa butter, which are used in the manufacture of chocolate products.

Our last stop was the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana where we learned about its history and achievements in cocoa research and toured the facilities. We also had the opportunity to meet with the recipients of WCF Challenge Grant funds and meet with the two Cocoa Borlaug Fellows from Ghana who completed their fellowships in 2008 and 2009.

Both Musu and Michael returned to Liberia with a better understanding of the requirements for a successful quality control system, an appreciation for the importance of reinvesting in the cocoa sector, and numerous ideas for developing the sector in Liberia.

Funding for the participation of Musu Flomo and Michael Wilcox was provided by ACDI/VOCA through the LIFE Project, while funding for the participation of Michael Titoe was provided by the Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Program Global Cocoa Initiative.