ter focuses on cocoa, some of the conclusions are also valid for other tropical
tree crops that are both consumers of tropical forest and potential allies in the
search for sustainability in tropical forest regions.
Continental Drifts: How the Cocoa Tree
Conquered the Tropics
The center of origin of the cocoa tree probably is on the eastern equatorial
slope of the Andes and undoubtedly is in the Amazon basin. The oldest real
center of cultivation seems to have been Central America, where the crop has
been under cultivation for more than 2,000 years (Cope 1976). Once the
Spanish had learned from the Amerindians how to transform it into a palat-
able drink, cocoa became an economically important commodity. Cocoa trees
of the criollovariety from Central America were planted in Venezuela and
Trinidad in 1525; subsequently Jamaica, Haiti, and the Windward Islands
became important producers (Cope 1976).
From this point, world cocoa production increased as new countries
adopted the crop while previous production centers collapsed. The continu-
ous increase in world production over the centuries hides a succession of
national and regional boom-and-bust cycles. In the sixteenth century, Central
America was the first region to develop a cocoa economy before it relinquished
the lead position to the Caribbean, especially Jamaica and Venezuela.
Venezuela became the world’s leader in cocoa production in the eighteenth
century before it declined at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
Ecuador took over and its port Guayaquil became the world’s capital of cocoa
export from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s. As cocoa pro-
duction in Ecuador collapsed, its place was taken by production in Brazil and
Ghana. Subsequently, Ilhéus and Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, Accra in Ghana,
Lagos in Nigeria, and Abidjan in the Côte d’Ivoire became the leading cocoa
export ports of the twentieth century, shipping hundreds of thousands of tons
of cocoa to Europe and North America. From 1980 to the early 1990s,
Malaysia started to monopolize the New York stock market’s fax machines, but
its cocoa cycle was one of the shortest in history; Indonesia, especially the
island of Sulawesi, took over almost immediately.
These production shifts from one country to the next were reproduced by
similar cycles on the subnational scale. The history of cocoa growing in the
Côte d’Ivoire, discussed in detail in this chapter, and the more recent one of
Sulawesi show cut-and-run cycles in regions of early adoption of the crop that
were then abandoned for new pioneer fronts. Descriptions of these shifts of
cocoa-growing regions from different continents and separated in time by four
centuries sound surprisingly similar, underscoring a feature that characterizes
much of cocoa history:
- Chocolate Forests and Monocultures 109