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.