From South America to Worldwide
The term of ‘cocoa’ is a corruption of the world ‘cacao’ that is taken directly from Mayan and Aztec languages. Chocolate is derived form cocoa beans, central to the fruit of cocoa tree.
Theobroma cacao which is indigenous to South America and believed to have originated from the Amazon and Orinoco valleys.
Theobroma (food of the gods) are the family Sterculiaceae with four principal types:
Criollo, about 5% of world cocoa production and the more common Forastero, with smaller, flatter and purple beans; Nacional with fine flavour, grown in Ecuador. The fourth variety Trinitario, a more disease-resistant hybrid of Criollo and Forastero is regarded as a flavour bean.
Theobroma cacao grows between tropics of Cancer and Capricorn with varieties originating in forest areas of South America.
Forastero – a basic cocoa, grows mainly in Brazil and West Africa, whilst flavour cocoas are largely hybrids and are cultivated in Central and South America, via Caribbean islands, and Hernandos Cortex, a Spanish, took cocoa to Spain as a beverage and to Spanish Guinea as a crop.
The Spanish not only took cocoa to Europe but also introduce the crop into Fernando Po in the seventeenth century and thus laid the foundation of the future economics of many West African countries.
Currently West Africa produces around 68% of world cocoa, while the share of the Far East is projected to remain at 18 percent and that of Latin America and the Caribbean at 14 percent.
In 2010 world grindings of cocoa beans, a proxy for world cocoa consumption, would amount to 3.6 million tones, reflecting an average annual increase of 2.1 percent from 2.8 million tones during the base period.
From South America to Worldwide
