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Chocolate: it's loved around the world.
But over the past 15 years the cocoa plant, which provides chocolate's main ingredients
has fallen prey to devastating disease
that has cost growers $700M in losses each year.
Now IBM Research, the largest commercial lab, in collaboration with
Mars, the world's largest chocolate company
and the USDA's Agricultural Research Service
are teaming up to safeguard the world's chocolate supply
and help the agricultural community worldwide.
"What does it take to produce better chocolate?
"What is the threat in the world to the chocolate that we have now?
"How do you protect and make sure that you have the best crop?
"A crop that is tolerant to pesticides, to pests and to drought.
"How do you increase yield?"
By combining their scientific resources to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome,
the groups are aiming to create healthier, stronger cocoa crops
with higher yields that can fend off disease and drought.
"If you look at what threatens the crop today, there are a lot of natural threats
"to crops of cocoa and other crops around the world.
"One of the ways in which we can try and figure out how to
"solve some of these problems is to sequence the genome
"of the cocoa plant and from that try and understand which variations in the genome
"point us to higher yield, more tolerance and so on."
These sustainable crops will help protect an important social, economic and environmental driver in Africa,
where 70 percent of the world's cocoa is produced.
where 70 percent of the world's cocoa is produced.
This work could have vast implications for making crops more resilient,
combating food shortages through science and eliminating disease outbreaks
like what we've witnessed in the U.S. recently with tomatoes and spinach.
And through this work, perhaps chocolate will taste even better.
This is Jeff Gluck, reporting.