Sweet Motivation
Truth about Trade & Technology board member Bill Horan wrote an editorial on the development of biotech cacao. While the exact nature of the biotech trait being researched is not known, Horan notes that the research will lead to lower cacao prices and will help farmers in Africa produce more.
C.S. Prakash
Sweet Motivation
Truth about Trade & Technology
08 August 2008
On his fourth voyage across the ocean, Columbus captured a large trading canoe off the coast of what is now Honduras. Among its contents were beans from cacao trees. The explorer seems not to have understood their true significance. He had stumbled upon the key ingredient to chocolate.
A couple of generations would pass before Europeans developed a taste for what was already considered a delicacy among the indigenous people of Central and South America. Today, of course, chocolate has gone global--it’s possibly the most popular flavor in the world.
Chocolate makers would like to keep it that way: Mars, the candy company, recently decided to invest $10 million to unravel the genome of the cacao tree. The motivation behind the five-year project is to develop a hardier crop, using the latest tools of biotechnology.
Comments
yes.. maybe that it..
good post
Posted by: kabonfootprint | September 13, 2008 10:31 AM