A virus is jeopardizing global chocolate production by affecting cacao trees in West Africa, with significant losses in Ghana. New strategies, including costly vaccines and mathematical models to optimize tree planting, are being developed to combat this threat.poses a risk to the health of cacao trees and the dried seeds used to make chocolate, putting the worldwide supply of this beloved treat at risk.
Farmers can combat the mealybugs by giving vaccines to the trees to inoculate them from the virus. But the vaccines are expensive, especially for low-wage farmers, and vaccinated trees produce a smaller harvest of cacao, compounding the devastation of the virus.
“Mealybugs have several ways of movement, including moving from canopy to canopy, being carried by ants or blown by the wind,” Chen-Charpentier said. “What we needed to do was create a model for cacao growers so they could know how far away they could safely plant vaccinated trees from unvaccinated trees in order to prevent the spread of the virus while keeping costs manageable for these small farmers.