TT has been internationally recognised for its cocoa and has won eight international cocoa awards since the inception of the Cocoa Excellence Programme in 2009. TT was famous for its cocoa quality over 100 years ago, but attempts of recent years to revitalise the industry are flagging.

Prof Pathmanathan Umaharan, director of UWI's Cocoa Research Centre, who is also advocating for the revitalising of the cocoa industry, has also discussed making chocolates locally for export – but the remaining cocoa farmers need much more to make the industry what it was over 100 years ago.

President of the Lopinot Cocoa Farmers Joseph Ronnie Garcia said more awareness and encouragement is needed to get people on board with the making cocoa a source of foreign income and get them working on the estates.

"Cocoa is a very manual thing – a lot of manual labour is needed – and then people were not going outside to do that. It was and is still hard to get people to do it.

"I do my own thing and go in the estate when I can, but a lot of people grow the cocoa trees and cut it to get short crops."

He added that the amount of cocoa a farmer would usually get before 2020 is no longer what it used to be.

[caption id="attachment_1033043" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Ortinola Cocoa Estate in the Maracas St Joseph Valley harvests their cocoa pods. This is a labour intensive process.(File photo) - ROGER JACOB[/caption]

"What I normally pick, I will get an average of over 100 kilograms (kgs) wet – before the fermenting and drying process – and what I got this year... if I got 40 kgs, I got plenty. So less than half the usual amount."

He said this is owing to unpredictable weather patterns and lack of labour.

Garcia added that payments to farmers from chocolate-makers were also a problem, leading to many people leaving the industry or hesitant to join.

"It's only now the chocolatiers paying a little change, because there is actually no cocoa. The chocolatiers only wanted to pay farmers $20-$25 per kg and the farmers really had to work hard.

"Production is picking the cocoa, heaping it up in one area, crack them, take the cocoa from the pods, clean it, put it in the sweat box to sweat for six-seven days – which you have to turn every two days – then it has to dry, which takes another week. So it takes two weeks to get the get the cocoa to make products, but they only want to give farmers $25 per kg."

This year, however, farmers got $40-$60 per kg because of the shortage, he said.

Garcia added that this is one of the many reasons people prefer to work small jobs instead of getting into cocoa farming, but being a retired man, this is one of the ways he keeps active.

His hopes for the upcoming cocoa season – November-July – is a stable weather pattern suitable for boosting cocoa production.

Arthur Cooper, cocoa farmer and owner of a cocoa estate in the Las Lapas Heights, Lopinot, also shared his insights into the cocoa shortage, saying it was because there were many abandoned and inaccessible cocoa and coffee esta