Live From Trinidad: Plants Without Borders
Tomorrow (Tuesday, June 20), a team of Penn State researchers will leave University Park bound for the island of Trinidad, and subscribers to Newswire are invited along for the ride. The project, "Plants Without Borders," aims both to share some of the latest technology for growing one of the world’s favorite crops — cocoa — and to learn about agricultural practices on the island.

It all started earlier this year, when Candice Thomas, an undergraduate majoring in horticulture, met cocoa farmer Roopchand Baschk, of Mayaro, Trinidad, through her home-town church. As a service project, the church had undertaken to build a new house for Baschk and his family.

Thomas also happens to work in the laboratory of Mark Guiltinan, associate professor of plant molecular biology and director of Penn State’s cocoa biotechnology program. "So she came to me and said, ‘We’re a cocoa lab. What can we do for him?’" Guiltinan remembers.

Guiltinan, Thomas, and other lab personnel began to kick around some ideas, and before long "Plants without Borders" was born. Says Guiltinan: "It’s an opportunity to do something that will really help farmers. And to expose students to international development work, get their feet wet. It’s also a good way for us to learn about local growing practices. We hope to do this a couple of times a year."

This week’s trip to Trinidad is the pilot. During the 10 days they will spend in-country, Guiltinan and his team plan to build a greenhouse, including an irrigation system for raising cocoa seedlings on Baschk’s seven-acre farm. They will also give a workshop in cocoa-propagation techniques for local farmers, meet with scientists from the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, and visit one of the world’s largest cocoa seed-banks.

Penn State science writer Dave Pacchioli, accompanying the team, plans to send back real-time dispatches on their progress.

Making international connections is crucial to Guiltinan’s work as director of the Penn State cocoa program, which is funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S.D.A.. Over the past few years, he has initiated cooperative research in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, all major cocoa producers. Last summer, he and members of his lab spent two weeks at the Union Vale Estate on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, field-testing cocoa plants they had cloned in the greenhouse in Pennsylvania. (Guiltinan’s dispatches from St. Lucia are archived on the Web at http://www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/St_Lucia/.)

These efforts, it is hoped, will have important benefits not only for cocoa growers in developing countries, but for Pennsylvaniaís $5-billion-dollar chocolate industry. Pennsylvania is the largest chocolate-manufacturing state in the U.S., producing 1.2 billion pounds per year of the sweet stuff, or 38.6 percent of all U.S. chocolate. Some 12 percent of Pennsylvania milk production, 1.3 million pounds per day, is also used in making chocolate.

Cocoa, chocolateís key ingredient, grows only in the humid tropics, where 70 percent of the world crop is grown by small farmers like Roopchand Baschk. Unfortunately, Theobroma cacao, the cocoa tree, is not easy to grow. Plant diseases like Witchesí Broom and Black Pod destroy 40 percent of the potential crop each year, Guiltinan notes. Even among healthy plants, yields are highly uneven. Because there has not been much breeding done, Guiltinan says, a small percentage of plants produces over 50 percent of the annual yield. ìThere are 5-6 billion cocoa plants in the world,î he adds. ìThe large majority of them are aging and will need to be replaced in the next 20 years.î

The Penn State program is aimed at using cutting-edge biotechnology to aid and accelerate cocoa-plant improvement. Over the past few years, Guiltinan and his team have developed a suite of new propagation systems, including a process for cloning high-yield plants, a micropropagation technique, and a low-tech system for producing rooted cuttings that farmers can practice in the field. ìWeíre trying to integrate all these systems,î Guiltinan says. Currently, they are field-testing the techniques.

The overall goals, Guiltinan says, are to increase and stabilize cocoa production on the world market, improve the economic status of small farmers and their cocoa-producing countries, and to protect rainforest habitat by making cocoa a more stable crop and so reducing the incentive for farmers to switch to more environmentally damaging, and less-sustainable, alternatives.

In addition to Guiltinan and Thomas, the team traveling to Trinidad will include research associate Siela Maximova, doctoral student Carter Miller, and undergraduate Nick Willis. If all goes as planned, Pacchioli, associate editor of Research/Penn State magazine, will send back a series of dispatches, complete with digital pictures, from the field. Look for excerpts next week on Newswire, and full stories and pictures on the new Research/Penn State website, at http://www.research.psu.edu/rps/