On a quarter-moon lit night, a scream covers the loud song of the frogs. Samuel, a 30-year-old farmer from Arquia, in the north western department of Chocó, Colombia, was gun-fishing with his wife, a flashlight strapped around his forehead. As the tradition goes in the region, he was diving in apnea and shooting as many fishes as he could per immersion of suspended breath. Each caught fish would promptly be removed from the hook and stuck within firmly sealed teeth. This time though, a trapped catfish got loose from the strong hold of Samuel’s jaws and stuck in the middle of his throat.
Arquia is a small indigenous community of about 70 families located a little less than six miles away from the closest town, Unguia. It usually takes a 30 minute motorbike ride followed by a 30 minute walk in deep mud to reach the village, but that night it took eight men three hours to get Samuel to the hospital in a hammock that would become his funeral bed. The next day, another 10 men were carrying him in the same hammock to the cemetery in a quiet and colorful procession that crossed the river at the pace of the stream. In a Totumo cup by the tomb a mix of achiote and cocoa burned.
Cocoa is native to the deep tropical regions of Central and South America. In its earliest forms, Mayans used it to create a ritual beverage that was shared during marriage ceremonies. The dried seeds were also exchanged for goods. Further South, Kunas from Arquia still use the violet beans for certain rituals or as a medicine. They burn them to release headaches or eat them to calm a sore throat. But, like most farmers in Chocó, they now grow the fruit almost exclusively for commercial purposes. The trees that naturally reach 23 to 32-feet in height are kept short to enable a smooth harvest, and each hectare of land features the very precise number of 721 trees.
Mathematics and politics entered in the cocoa conversation in Colombia about 10 years ago, when the government initiated a program meant to financially support farmers from Chocó and to reduce the involvement of armed groups in the drug business. Known as the Programa de Familias Guardabosques (PFGB), the governmental plan supported the development of alternative and self-sustainable cultures in regions with a potentially high production of coca, the plant from which cocaine is extracted.
As the lushest department in Colombia, Chocó was a main target of the PFGB program. Its dense rainforest is home to a five-decade long, high-intensity conflict, turning Chocó into the poorest region in the country. For years, faced with either emigrating or enduring the ongoing violence between guerillas and paramilitaries, locals were forced to displacement or to a harsh survival based on farming. A number of them turned to coca, which offered substantial returns, until 2006-2007, when cocoa was promoted as a substitution product with great economic prospects. Except for a period of supply disruption in the late 1970s and again in 2009-2011, the long-term constant dollar price of cocoa since the end of the 1950s has been stable, at around 2,500 dollars/metric ton. Out of these figures, farmers only get a low percentage, as they sell their harvest to a Colombian export corporation in charge of international deal. A kilo of cocoa pays farmers 8,000COP/kilo (around $2.75), which is much less than coca. Still, it remains a much more lucrative product than alternatives such as plantain or palm, and a much safer one to sell than coca.
The program’s positive outcome inspired a chapter of the peace agreement signed 18 months ago between FARC, the Marxist guerrilla group, and the government in the form of financial support to farmers willing to transition from illegal to legal agriculture. For many farmers, such promises are government propaganda. A number qualify as displaced, having been forced to flee violence several times over the past decades, and still haven’t received any compensation that was promised a few years ago. The election of Ivan Duque as president of Colombia last month may prove them right, as he is a sharp critic of the historical agreement and has promised to radically revise it. Nevertheless, cocoa plantations keep cropping up across the rainforest as steps toward a craved peace.
A ton of dry cocoa is the result of a patient process. The eight-inch long fruits grow directly on the trunk or branches of the tree and present a thick stalk that no mechanical shaking can break off. What’s needed is either a machete or a sharp knife, in addition to a trained eye, as cocoa trees grow fruits over a seven month period, resulting in heterogeneous stages of maturity.
Collecting the fruits of a hectare-wide field involves six to ten people, who in Chocó are generally members of the family or the community. A machete at hand and a wicker bucket on the back, harvesters grab and cut the heavy and colorful pods one by one. #51, #45, #41–each variety has its number and shade of yellow, orange, red, green or purple. At the end of the day, the fruits are piled in a wide, messy, heap in the shade of a tree.
The same group will meet up the next day, sitting on dead trunks and other slices of wood for the second step, known in cocoa jargon as “dispulping,” and appreciated among pickers as an occasion for lively conversation. A harvester leads the group with the boom of breaking the cocoa pods. Depending on his style, he cuts the pod in half either horizontally with a machete, or vertically with a cudgel. Once open, the hexagonal, ovoid carapace unveils 30 to 50 seeds that are surrounded with a sweet, white, viscous pulp. Thick as a thumb, these beans are gathered in large buckets before being placed at the end of the day in fermentation containers and covered with plantain or banana leaves for five days. No strict science applies to the fermentators, as their types range from wooden boxes to a low-tech version–an old fridge.
At the end of the fermentation process, a perfume of hot alcohol surrounds the boxes. The pulp has darkened and dried the beans. They are body-temperature warm, sticky, with reddish hues, and still need to be dried. For five more days–rarely less given Chocó’s high level of humidity–beans are spread across long wooden tables protected from the rain by transparent plastic roofs, and jumbled three times a day. Physical effort increases at the next step, when workers shake the beans on holed trays to get rid of the runts, and collect the seeds in the 61-kilo jute bags required by the national and international markets. Under the weight of the bags, facial features become distorted and mules collapse, but by way of horse, boat and truck, they ultimately make their way to Medellín, where they will be exported, their bitter scent spreading around the world.
