The reasons why upland farmers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are engaged in a cacao boom and its long term implications are addressed in the context of protected area management regulations, and political and economic conditions in Post-Suharto, Indonesia. In the remote case study village of Moa in Central Sulawesi, we found that while few households cultivated cacao in the early 1990s, ...

The aims of this study were to determine the proximate composition of cacao pod husk as well as the optimal conditions for extraction and purification of theobromine from cacao pod husk. The results indicated that cacao pod husk had high contents of moisture and carbohydrate (87.06% and 11.03% by fresh weight, respectively), but low contents of crude protein, crude lipid, and ash (0.31%, 0.12%,...

BACKGROUND The promotion of cacao agroforestry is one of the ways of diversifying farmer income and creating incentives through their inclusion in REDD+ interventions. We estimated the aboveground carbon stocks in cacao and shade trees, determined the floristic diversity of shade trees and explored the possibility of implementing REDD+ interventions in cacao landscapes. Using replicated multi-s...

Chocolate is a highly valued and palatable confectionery product. Chocolate is primarily made from the processed seeds of the tree species Theobroma cacao. Cacao cultivation is highly relevant for small-holder farmers throughout the tropics, yet its productivity remains limited by low yields and widespread pathogens. A panel of 148 improved cacao clones was assembled based on productivity and d...

Witches' broom disease, caused by Crinipellis perniciosa, is one of the major fungal diseases causing severe losses to cacao tree (Theobroma cacao L.) plantations in South America. One of the challenges associated with the understanding of the cacao and Crinipellis interaction in genomic studies is the isolation of intact nucleic acids. In this report, we describe a new, successful, and reliabl...

The endophytic niches of plants are a rich source of microbes that can directly and indirectly promote plant protection, growth and development. The diversity of culturable endophytic fungi from stems and branches of Theobroma cacao (cacao) and Theobroma grandiflorum (cupuaçu) trees growing in the Amazon region of Brazil was assessed. The collection of fungal endophytic isolates obtained was ap...

This paper presents the participation of the CACAO prototype to the TEL@CLEF 2009 task, an evaluation track focusing on multilingual document retrieval over a collection of library catalogues. CACAO (Cross-language Access to Catalogues And On-line libraries) is an EU project devoted to enabling cross-language access to the contents of a federation of digital libraries with a set of software too...

Mesoamerican peoples had a long history of cacao use--spanning more than 34 centuries--as confirmed by previous identification of cacao residues on archaeological pottery from Paso de la Amada on the Pacific Coast and the Olmec site of El Manatí on the Gulf Coast. Until now, comparable evidence from San Lorenzo, the premier Olmec capital, was lacking. The present study of theobromine residues c...

The reasons why upland farmers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are engaged in a cacao boom and its long term implications are addressed in the context of protected area management regulations, and political and economic conditions in Post-Suharto, Indonesia. In the remote case study village of Moa in Central Sulawesi, we found that while few households cultivated cacao in the early 1990s, ...

Transcriptional regulation, led by transcription factors (TFs) such as those of the WRKY family, is a mechanism used by the organism to enhance or repress gene expression in response to stimuli. Here, we report on the genome-wide analysis of the Theobroma cacao WRKY TF family and also investigate the expression of WRKY genes in cacao infected by the fungus Moniliophthora perniciosa. In the caca...