Stories: As Chocolate Prices Soar, Map of Genome Offers Solutions

February 14, 2011

This Valentine's Day, you might notice chocolate getting more expensive. More and more people across the world are developing a taste for it, while fewer farmers are growing cacao, the shade-loving but hard-to-grow trees that give us chocolate. Instead, cacao farmers are cutting down tropical forests to grow more lucrative crops like palm trees, wheat and rice. But with a new understanding of cacao genetics, plant biologists say they can produce a tree that's beneficial to farmers, the environment and consumers. WPSU intern Anthony Brino reports.