Future rests on genetics

Central to the rebuilding effort in the Sulawesi cocoa industry is the need for a large-scale cocoa genotype improvement program that can deliver to growers disease and pest-resistant seedlings which produce good-quality cocoa that is also locally adapted.

Many of the current cocoa trees in Sulawesi originate from seed brought from Malaysia without quality screening.

La Trobe University botanist Dr Philip Keane is one of the scientists whose expertise is being made available to Indonesian cocoa smallholders through the support and facilitation of AusAID and ACIAR.

Dr Keane explains that the problems afflicting Indonesia’s cocoa industry are symptomatic of the end of the natural ‘honeymoon period’ for cocoa growing, after its initial rapid expansion in a new region, such as Sulawesi. The same situation occurred in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s.

Trees can grow quite healthily for up to 20 years, he says, before succumbing to the build-up of pests and diseases and decline in soil fertility associated with a lack of management that can be common among smallholder farmers during the initial production period.

For the past two decades Indonesian farmers have enjoyed a cocoa boom, but Dr Keane says farmers now need a concerted program of varietal improvement and more advanced farm management to ensure the industry overcomes the production constraints that have built up.

To place the industry on a long-term sustainable footing, Dr Keane says the involvement and training of farmers is crucial to the program’s success.

Farmers are being taught how to identify superior types among their own genetically diverse cocoa and how to graft this better material onto substandard trees, which are eventually cut back to become the rootstocks. Alternatively they can graft seedlings, which are then planted into gaps in the farm.

“Farmers are encouraged to compare the performance of the selected genotypes with their standard trees,” Dr Keane says. “This is one of the ‘big ideas’ we are promoting: farmer experimentation … ‘suck-it-and-see’. This helps farmers consider themselves as businessmen and as ‘scientists’, and helps to dispel the perception that they are merely ‘peasant’ farmers.

“We are trying to do the same with simple pest and disease-control methods: try them on 20 trees and compare the results with neighbouring trees.”

Training and nursery establishment are now underway, boosted by the involvement of the main buyer for cocoa, Mars.

Working in PNG in the 1970s, Dr Keane discovered the fungal cause of vascular-streak dieback (VSD), which is a destructive disease of cocoa in the region.

In this ACIAR-supported project he is working with La Trobe colleague Dr Peter McMahon, Professor David Guest from the University of Sydney and Dr Smilja Lambert from Mars Australia. Dr Jeff Neilson from the University of Sydney is conducting sociological research on factors limiting the uptake of new farming methods. And Mars Symbioscience field coordinator, Mr Hussin bin Purung, has been applying these ideas with farmer groups in Sulawesi.