BRIBRI DE TALAMANCA – Most chocolate is sweet. For a group of organic farmers in Talamanca, in Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean zone, cultivating cacao beans – from which chocolate is made – has brought them some sweet business.
Some 800 producers from the region have bound together to form a cooperative that is producing organic cacao of such high quality that manufacturers of fine chocolates in Italy have begun to prefer cacao produced here to beans produced in Africa – a much more easily accessible import location.
The cooperative is called the Association of Small Producers of Talamanca (APPTA), and according to Javier Méndez, manager of the group, the association exports about 200 metric tons of cacao per year – 50 tons to Europe, and the rest to the United States. The cacao sells for $1,500 a ton, he said.
THE cacao grows on trees on producers’ property that blend in with the natural vegetation of the area. Compared to major cacao plantations, each has a relatively small number of trees, and the plants – untouched by pesticides – could be considered parasite-infested. Eleodoro López owns one such farm outside the village of Bribrí, named after the area’s indigenous tribe, almost on the Panamanian border.
“This goes all the way through,” he said, pointing to a rotten spot on one of the orange pods as rain fell through the trees. He took out his machete and reached up and chopped it off the tree and then hacked it open, revealing brown, destroyed fruit. Purchasers of organic cacao, however, are willing to pay a higher price than they would for conventionally grown cacao, so losing a few pods here and there is not devastating to his farm, López explained. With the profit from his tiny plantation, López, 52, said he is able to steadily support his family.
LIKE López, most of the cooperative’s producers maintain their crops themselves. Though López has gotten help through the years from his eight children, some who still live at home, he said he mostly takes care of the farm himself. His youngest is nine, and still helps him now and again, he said. López and other APPTA producers ship their cacao beans to one central plant just outside of Bribrí, where the fruits are fermented, dried and packaged for export.
Carlos Calero, manager of the processing plant, said six days of fermentation in sacks and then six days of sun drying is the ideal method for processing the beans. Calero said the fermentation and drying processes acutely affect the flavor and aroma of the beans. Fermentation is never a problem. However, he said, the best cacao is produced during the rainy season, and heavy rains make sun drying difficult, if not impossible. When it is too rainy to dry the beans in the sun, they’re sent to huge beds that provide a steady flow of warm air, where they’re dried for two days. The final product is still of sufficient quality to be exported to Italy, he said, but sun drying is preferable.
THE Regional Environmental Program for Central America (PROARCA) is helping APPTA solve this problem by working with cooperative members to construct a solar drying unit, said Carlos Morales, of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), also working as a representative of PROARCA. The unit, he said, will also help the plant cut down on power consumption.
The Talamanca cooperative includes a large number of indigenous families, some who have taken further ownership of their cacao. Bribrí women traditionally have known how to make chocolate, which is native to the New World, said Marina López, president of the Commission of Indigenous Bribrí Women.
The commission recently decided to take this tradition a step further. Bribrí women in the area now produce artisanal chocolate for local sale, and eventually hope to sell it to specific markets elsewhere in Costa Rica.
“WE know how to make chocolate,” she said. “Traditionally, we know. But knowing that we’re going to commercialize it, we have to improve a lot of things.” It was an idea born of conversations between women of the tribe, she said, trying to come up with a way to improve their quality of life. “Here, there is no work,” she said. “Here, the work is our determination to work.”
That determination has led to steady sale of their chocolate, prepared in balls that can be mixed in hot milk. Sales vary, she said, but they have had several large orders. For example, they have an order for 300 of the balls for delivery May 15.
TO make the chocolate, they first roast the beans in a pot over a fire for about 10 minutes. They then peel them, roast them for ten more minutes, and run them through a manual coffee grinder. This produces a fine powder they mix with sugar and roll into the balls, which retain their form after drying a few minutes.
Claudina Morales, who has been making chocolate with the commission for a year and a half, said the group is looking for an affordable source of organic sugar. Right now, the women must sell their cacao to APPTA for processing and re-purchase the beans. To help make their process more autonomous, PROARCA – which already provided manual grinders for the women – is providing funding to build solar driers similar to the one being constructed at the APPTA plant, Morales said.
The women would then have a completely self-contained operation. And according to the Bribrí women, the project will remain in the hands of women. THE Bribrí separate themselves by clans, they explained, and the name of the clan always stays with the women. Thus, to make sure the cacao plantations stay in control of their particular clan, the Dojkuak, the women pass their land on to their daughters. Because men switch clans when they marry, passing land on to them could be a risky venture. Marina López said the women have become rather proficient at making the chocolate, and promoting their product remains their main challenge.
