![]() A success in Ecuador in the early 2000s, it had never been used on a large scale until Indonesia adopted it in 2009. The technique called somatic embryogenesis, or SE, was invented to produce high-yielding, disease-resistant seeds. Moreover, farmers say output from cocoa trees in much of Sulawesi appears to have been hurt by the cloning technique, originally intended to hasten seed production, but which has led instead to sickly trees that yield small, discolored beans. ![]() The world will need an additional 1 million metric tons (1.1023 million tons) of cocoa beans annually by 2020, Engbers estimates.įactbox: Snapshot of Indonesia's cocoa industryīut a smaller than expected share of that increase will come from Indonesia, battered by bad weather and a cloning technique gone awry, yielding the outsize, misshapen trees that traders and farm researchers have dubbed “Frankentrees”.ĭespite the battle to boost output, dry weather is expected to keep Indonesia’s output this year at between 435,000 and 450,000 metric tons, or a drop of almost a third since 2006. “Everybody realizes we need more supply because the demand is growing,” said Ruud Engbers, president director of Mars Symbioscience Indonesia, a unit of privately owned Mars Inc, one of the world’s leading food manufacturers, which turns out Snickers and Twix candy bars. ![]() In the last five years, the country’s grinding capacity has doubled to reach around 400,000 metric tons (440,925 tons) this year, making it Asia’s largest after Malaysia. To meet the growing appetite for chocolate in Asia, fed by rising incomes and growing populations, multinational firms such as Cargill and Barry Callebaut, the world’s top chocolate maker, have built grinding projects in Indonesia. Ratios, an indicator of demand, have rallied more than 40 percent since January in Asia, boosted by year-end festive demand and a drop in grindings in Europe that curbed supply of cocoa butter, which makes chocolate melt in the mouth. The main growing island of Sulawesi, where Nurhaedah works for a trading firm based in Singapore, is the center of a three-year-old effort to boost cocoa output to 600,000 metric tons (661,387 tons) by 2013, to meet demand from grinders in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia.Īs top cocoa grower Ivory Coast struggles to stamp out an outbreak of fungal disease in the face of bad weather, problems in Indonesia and the likelihood of a disruptive El Nino weather pattern could leave the global market with a deficit of around 40,000 metric tons (44,092 tons) in the current crop year, driving prices higher. Many trees have fallen down and when you pull them up, it’s obvious they don’t have taproots.”įarmers’ disappointment at the outcome of the three-year campaign that aimed at increasing cocoa output to offset tight supplies and satisfy rising demand is ironically driving some to cultivate palm oil, which brings in more money for less work. “I don’t think anyone has told us what went wrong. “Farmers are complaining the beans are so small they look like roasted peanuts,” said Nurhaedah, as her deft fingers sought out the bigger beans whose size indicated better quality. REUTERS/Yusuf AhmadĪ $350-million campaign to boost cocoa yields in Indonesia, the world’s third largest producer of the commodity, is turning sour as farmers send streams of poor-quality beans plucked from the defective trees to a collecting center Nurhaedah runs. A farmer stands near cocoa fruit in a cocoa plantation in Pinrang district in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province September 20, 2012.
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