Cocoa pod borer

Did you know that there’s such a thing as a cocoa pod borer? No? It’s probably not really something that you’ve wondered about. Well yes, there is a cocoa pod borer and it has devastated the local cocoa crops here. People here used to produce a lot of cocoa as their cash crop, but since the borer came in, they switched to copra (coconut). However it is much harder work to produce copra, and recently the value of copra has gone down too.

The World Bank helped to fund the provision of a new type of cocoa plant that is more resistant to the cocoa pod borer. Villagers can buy young cocoa plants and start new cocoa gardens, but first they have to clear the ground of their old and pretty useless cocoa plants, so this was happening a lot recently.

Here are a couple of photos of rather sad-looking, felled cocoa plots.

These cocoa plots don’t look like that any more. They now have young cocoa plants growing in them. I should take photos when I’m there again to show you the difference. There was a while there when people had got their cocoa plants and they were in the village, needing to be taken up to the gardens, and they were carried up in the usual manner here, in the traditional backpacks. It looked rather funny to me, seeing the tips of the small trees peeping over people’s shoulders. I also got involved and carried two plants up once.

Harvesting cocoa

One day when I was in the village, I went out with our family to the garden to harvest cocoa. Cocoa is one of the cash crops in PNG – the people grow it and sell it to businesses who produce things like chocolate from it.

I had a pretty easy job when we harvested the cocoa. Papa took the cocoa pods down from the tree, our sister Rachel cut them open, and then I dug my fingers into them and pulled the beans out and put them in a big bag. It was really easy, but there was a seemingly never-ending supply of cocoa pods, so after several hours, my skin was beginning to get a bit thin. I was thankful when they insisted that I stop and rest. I think I probably did about 40kg worth of beans.

So next time you each chocolate, you can think of me helping to make it!!

Rachel cutting a pod open:

An open cocoa pod ready for me to remove the beans:

The cocoa beans that I removed (half-way through the day – I pretty much filled the bag all the way to the top!).

Some people also dry the cocoa beans in their village. At one village they had some that had been dried and we were able to eat a bean. It tasted bitter, sweet and alcoholic at the same time! I would describe it as tasting like chocolate wine, if there were such a thing.