Gourmet demand revives Central America cocoa farms

By Brian Harris

ALMIRANTE, Panama (Reuters) - Indigenous people grew cocoa here more than 2,000 years ago. Now, their descendants are reviving the crop to meet world demand for high-quality chocolate.

Throughout Central America, farmers like Manuel Abrigo are planting cocoa, taking advantage of high world cocoa prices and the premium their cocoa commands.

"I sowed cocoa because I saw my neighbor had it and I wanted more income, too," Abrigo, an Ngobe Indian, said in broken Spanish. His hillside farm, near the port of Almirante in western Panama, overlooks a glistening bay where Christopher Columbus dropped anchor in 1502.

Grown by the ancient Maya in Mexico and Central America long before the arrival of the Spanish, cocoa also has a long tradition with the Ngobe people, native to the Panama-Costa Rica border region, as well as indigenous communities in Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Spanish explorers recorded that indigenous people used cocoa beans as currency. Ten could buy a night with a prostitute, 100 could buy a slave, according to archeologist Michael Coe, joint author of a book called "The True History of Chocolate."

In the 1990s Abrigo and other farmers abandoned the crop when the trees were hit by fungus and world prices were low.

Now gourmet chocolate companies are turning to growers in Central America to supply cocoa that can be labeled organic and "fair trade," under which companies pledge to pay third-world farmers more for their crops.

The bulk of the world's cocoa is grown in Africa, where cacao trees were imported by Portuguese colonizers in the 1800s. But human rights groups accuse producers in Ivory Coast, the world's No. 1 supplier, of using the labor of child slaves.