Title:
Unwrapping the Genetic Secrets of a Chocolate Bar
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Cacao or cocoa trees grow in hot, rainy areas of
Africa, Asia and Central and South America. Their
beans are used to make cocoa powder, cocoa butter
and of course chocolate. There are five to six
million growers, maybe more. Many are poor family
farmers with only a few hectares. West Africa
produces more than half of all cocoa beans. Ivory
Coast leads the world in production, followed by its
neighbor Ghana. The trees are usually in their fifth
year when they start to grow the pods that contain
the beans. The trees produce the most pods when they
are ten, but they are still productive long after
that. Workers use large knives to cut the lower pods
and long tools to remove pods from high on the tree.
Later they break open the pods to remove the beans.
A half-gram of chocolate requires about four hundred
beans. The World Cocoa Foundation says an average
pod contains twenty to fifty beans. And experts say
growers may lose perhaps one-third of their harvest
to diseases and insects. But now scientists have
genetic maps of two kinds of cocoa trees. These
genomes are mostly complete and could lead
scientists to new ways to increase production and
prevent disease.Mapping genes is the first step to
understanding an organism. Next comes learning the
job of each gene. The American food company Mars
took the lead in paying for mapping the genes of the
Forastero cocoa tree. The Forastero provides eighty
to ninety percent of the world's cocoa beans. Mars
depends on those beans for its M&Ms and other
chocolate candies. The company's research partners
included several universities and the United States
Department of Agriculture. The average West African
cocoa farmer produces about four hundred kilos of
beans per hectare. But Howard-Yana Shapiro, head of
plant science and external research at Mars, thinks
that science could greatly increase the yield. A
competitor of Mars, Hershey's, supported the gene
mapping of the Criollo, a far less common cacao
tree. Cirad, a French government research center,
led scientists from six countries in creating that
genome. We'll talk more about the cocoa industry
next week, when we look at efforts to help child
laborers in Ivory Coast and Ghana. For VOA Special
English I'm Mario Ritter. You can read and listen to
our reports at voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
