Chocolate Could Go Extinct in Less Than 40 Years Due to Climate Change
Cacao plants, and the chocolate that is made from their beans, could disappear as early as 2050. Climate change models suggest that the warmer, dryer weather conditions in areas where cacao is grown could spell the end for the chocolate industry unless steps are taken.
One such step is to bio-engineer new cacao plant strains, ones that can thrive in the new weather about 40 years from now. Climate change is a huge problem for cacao growers, as Business Insider notes, and a major part of the issue stems from the cacao plant itself.
Cacao trees are especially vulnerable to fungal diseases, especially those that might get displaced by climate change, according to Forbes. Changing weather patterns could cause diseases like witch's broom, frosty pod, and others, such blights, to spread unchecked to parts of Central America and West Africa, home to most of the world's chocolate source
Get Our Latest News for FREE
More importantly, cacao plants are notoriously fussy when it comes to temperature, and even more so when it comes to humidity. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S., cacao trees can only grow within 20 degrees north or south of the equator, where conditions are just right — fairly constant warm temperatures, high humidity, high rainfall, low winds and rich soils, conditions one would expect from rainforests.
In a study in 2013 by Peter Läderach spelled dire news for West Africa cacao growers. "Of the 294 locations examined in the study, only 10.5% showed increasing suitability for cacao production; the remaining 89.5% were likely to become less suitable by 2050," Läderach's study found out, as summarized by the NOAA.
Plant genomics could be the answer to expanding the range of the cacao tree. Myeong-Je Cho and his team in the University of California at Berkeley is now working with the Mars corporation to develop cacao plants that can thrive in the drier, warmer weather decades from now.
