People eat 3 billion pounds of chocolate every year. Chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao. But despite chocolate's popularity in the United States and Europe, the cacao plant is in trouble. This is due to current agricultural and non-fair trade practices, according to botanist Frank Almeda, senior curator at the California Academy of Sciences.
The most common way of growing cacao is in a monoculture, the same way that corn is grown, which makes plants much more susceptible to a plethora of diseases and pest infestations, says Dr Almeda. Making things worse, cacao farmers make less than one dollar a day, so cultivating cacao isn't even economically feasible, so farmers are abandoning their cacao plantations.
But there are solutions: using sustainable agricultural practices and enacting Fair Trade agreements can be useful for protecting the plants and the farmers. And now there's a third way to protect the cacao plant as well: research. In 2010, the complete genome of the cacao plant was published and made freely accessible so researchers around the world can begin learning more about this plant (doi:10.1038/ng.736):
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