Sao Paulo, Oct 23 - Cursed by witch's broom disease, Brazilian cocoa farming has been languishing for two decades but new farms in the far north are bringing about a slow recovery, a government cocoa official said on Friday.
Raymundo Mello, Para state chief of Ceplac, the government executive commission for cocoa, said new farms and a favorable climate in the northern state on the Atlantic coast would see it dethrone Bahia in the northeast as top cocoa grower.
"In five or six years we will quite easily overtake Bahia. Bahia will stagnate," Mello said.
The chocolate industry should welcome any increase supplies amid worries that output from the world's top grower, Ivory Coast, will fall in the long term as taxes and disease grind at farmers' resolve.
High quality soil and a government-sponsored production model based on large numbers of small family farms are giving growers high yields and luring more farmers to cultivate cocoa.
Para also has more distinct rainy seasons, which are followed by dry periods that help subdue the witch's broom fungus.
Ceplac is spending around 4 million reais ($2.32 million) a year creating new cocoa plantations for growers free of charge, helping expand the state's cocoa sector work force to 30,000.
"These are new fields, not fields being replanted. We have demand for 25,000 hectares a year but we are planting about 15,000," Mello told Reuters from Para in a phone interview.
The expansion could hardly come at a better time. Prices for the beverage and chocolate ingredient soared to a 30-year high this week of $3,412 per tonne due to a tight supply outlook and the weak dollar.
But growers in Bahia say the government has done little to help them recover from a devastating witch's broom pandemic that slashed output and left them deeply in debt after they borrowed to take part in an aggressive plan to combat it.
FAVORABLE YIELDS, COSTS
Para has been the driving force behind a rise in cocoa output from states outside Bahia while the same favorable climate also exists in smaller cocoa-growing states Amazonas and Rondonia.
Total output from states other than Bahia thus far in the 2009/10 (May-April) season is 13 percent higher than this time a year ago, data from Bahia Cocoa Association showed, and 52 percent above the crop two years ago.
Mello said Para cocoa trees only produced one significant crop per year between March and October, with only a negligible number of pods obtained from the second growing cycle each year.
He estimated that in around five years, Para state alone could turn out about 100,000 tonnes a year, roughly what Bahia produces now, and said it had produced about 60,000 tonnes since March.
Total cocoa bean deliveries in Brazil totaled about 157,000 tonnes in the 2008/09 Oct-Sept international crop year.
Brazil was once the world's No. 2 cocoa supplier before witch's broom began ravaging fields in the late 1980s, relegating it to sixth place. The Ivory Coast is No. 1, accounting for 40 percent of the world supply.
The disease, which has no cure, can flourish then subside depending on weather conditions.
Mello said the economics of Para cocoa were good and attractive to new growers. Yields of 1 tonne per hectare were common, with costs about $600 a tonne, he said. Farm gate prices, like in Bahia, were about 6 reais ($3.50) a kilo.
Para also produces a few hundred tonnes of organic cocoa, a small portion of which is exported.