Farmers bare Bohol’s

Cacao supply shortage

TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol (PIA)--There is a huge need for cacao that the tableya makers and chocolatiers always run out of raw materials that they obtain their supplies from outside Bohol.

Although introduced by the Spaniards from Africa, cacao has grown in Bohol and has even seeped into the culture, with tableya and champorado becoming ubiquitous breakfast and merienda preparations.

Cacao farmers Efrenia Holt and Bern Karaan, both in their past 50 and are active members of the Bohol Cacao Development Council (BCDC), shared this, while urging everyone to look into the prospect of production first before processing.

Of all the members of the BCDC, less than 10 percent of them are into cacao production; most are processing roasted seeds into the basic tableya, cacao nibbles, chocolates and chocolate-based products.

The issue also underlines the much bigger and more alarming truth: with average age of Boholano farmers now at 59, there is a need to recruit the young into farming.

“This is a missed opportunity,” both agreed, knowing that cacao plants used to be found in most homes a century ago.

Production since then has been focused on the tableya, which is the most basic cacao product.

However, having lost the practice of introducing young kids to basic agriculture in the young school age, getting young people to reconsider farming may not be as easy as hiring young hands to work the land.

Here is where the country’s food security hangs in a balance.

A concern that has been repeatedly shared over at Kapihan sa PIA, the issue has even become more dire, when parents who want their children’s lives to be much easier, unwittingly discourage them into the “hard work,” associated with agriculture.

“Study well, or you will be bound to the hard task of farming all your life,” farmer Efrenia Holt, shared the usual remark farmer parents tell their kids.

The discouragement is understandable, because farming technologies then entail backbreaking tasks, gambling with favorable weather and getting less than their desired profits for their toil.

“It is much different now,” agrees Bern Karaan, who still managed to stand after a strong typhoon wiped out Fort Justine, an expansive farm in Sierra Bullones town.

Karaan is now starting over a multi-crop farm, in a much smaller scale in Lubcanan, Jagna

For cacao alone, there was a time when a kilo of cacao seeds fetch P600 a kilo, where cacao is among the plants that have been classified as forest plants.

For better production through, you will have to “love farming,” Holt explains, adding that without the dedication to farm, the struggle can easily fail.

Getting the love of farming would have its roots in a young farmer understanding the task and developing the patience and the hardwork associated with it, Holt added.

Since the Department of Agriculture has introduced mechanization, tractors, weeders, planters and even harvesters have almost totally replaced the use of draft animals and brute force in developing farms.

In fact, even technologies in soil identification, organic fertilizer use, propagation including grafting, and marcotting can now be available from extension workers in every town.

Farming now, unlike then, is science based and the technologies available spares people from the trouble of discovering themselves what works, hints Holt, whose Atbang Farm rose after she decided to finally settle in Bohol from abroad.

Atbang Farm is now into the value chain of the cacao production, and is using the farm to supply its needs for cacao, for its chocolate production.

Both farmers, who are now into cacao production, agreed that training kids into the basics of planting preparation, nursery development, and learning patience in nurturing the seedling into

harvest-able food, is not that taught in schools anymore. (PIABohol)