FEBRUARY 2018 SEEDWORLD.COM / 7 forecast compound annual growth rate of 4.5 per- cent from 2015-2020 compared with 1.7 percent for the world as a whole. This growth has made it the second largest region by volume, ahead of North America. In the past decade, chocolate sales in China have doubled and a billion people are starting to enjoy it. But the U.S. remains the largest chocolate market. Americans eat roughly 10 pounds of it a year per person. Production Perils Despite demand, cacao remains a struggling crop. Essential to the livelihoods of 40-50 mil- lion people worldwide, cacao production is labor intensive, and farmers face many challenges. Crops are lost to disease, aging trees, outdated farming techniques and limited organizational and research support, according to the World Cocoa Foundation. The three primary types of cacao trees are Criollo (rare), Forastero and Trinitario (a hybrid of the first two). The threats facing cacao farmers varies by region. In West Africa, Ghana’s cacao trees suffer insect damage, black pod rot, water mold and the swollen shoot virus. The fear is that these pests will attack healthy trees in neighboring Ivory Coast. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the cacao pod borer tunnels into the center of the fruit and eats the seeds before tunneling back out. These pests, which cost cacao growers $600 million in crop losses a year, are difficult to control and extremely damaging to cacao-dependent economies, according to the Invasive Species Compendium. Across the oceans, a fungal infection called witches’ broom in Brazil has reduced production by 80 percent. Another serious and damaging fungal disease called frosty pod rot is spreading through Latin America. On a lesser threat level, cacao trees have little genetic variation, and the major varieties all come from the same species. Although the similarity among strains means they can easily be crossbred, it also means that the collected strains do not contain enough variation to provide much natu- ral resilience to pests and disease. If one strain is genetically susceptible, chances are good they all will succumb. When farmers save their own seeds to plant new trees, this local inbreeding leaves the trees even more susceptible to pests and fungi. Additionally, Hervé Bisseleua, World Cocoa Foundation director of productivity, says farmers have limited access to financing that would allow them to purchase supplies such as fertilizer and quality planting materials. Digging Into the Genome In 2010, Mars (maker of Snickers, M&Ms, Twix and much more) collaborated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and IBM to sequence Theobroma Matina 1-6, a type of cacao. The results were made public through an online Genome Database. Simultaneously, another group comprised of Hershey, Pennsylvania State University and the French government worked to sequence Criollo, which cost an estimated $80 million. Mark Guiltinan, a professor of plant molecular biology, was part of this consortium. He says the results were published in Nature Genetics in 2009, just a year after work commenced. Today, he focuses on how genome sequenc- ing accelerates the breeding of disease-resistant 10 different major varieties of cacao exist. 10 pounds of chocolate per year is what the average American consumes. 70% of the world’s cacao comes from West Africa. Cacao seeds found inside the fruit is dried and fermented prior to being crafted into what we know as chocolate.