As cocoa supplies from Africa come under pressure, Mondelez International, which owns the Cadbury brand, has started expanding the cultivation of the crop in South India, while exploring the options to introduce the crop in the North Eastern parts of the country.
Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd has partnered with institutes such as the Central Plantation Crops Research Institute (CPCRI) and the Kerala Agriculture University in making available the seedlings and develop the required package of practices, sources said. Cocoa has traditionally been grown in India as an inter-crop in coconut plantations and of late it is being grown as a mono crop in parts of Andhra Pradesh.
Demand for planting material
K B Hebbar, Director, ICAR-CPCRI, Kasargod, said his institute has recently partnered with Mondelez India to develop the required package of practices and also make available good planting material to the farmers. The idea is to expand the area under cocoa both in key producing States in the South while exploring the potential in the North East, he said.
“There is a huge demand for cocoa planting material from farmers, following the increase in prices in the recent years,” Hebbar said, adding that right now there was a shortage of good planting material. In India the area under cocoa is estimated to be around 1 lakh hectares.
“Right now, the expansion is little bit faster because the price is good now. So, everybody would like to have this cocoa now,” said Hebbar.Farmers are also taking it up as an intercrop with oil palm, he said.
As part of the partnership, which is funded by Mondelez’s CSR initiative, CPCRI is developing cocoa seedlings through clonal propagation and also using the seeds. “There are reports that this cocoa comes up well in Andhra Pradesh as a monocrop. We would like to study and test it as mono crop in some places,” Hebbar said.
As per the government’s first advance estimates, the cocoa production in India is estimated at 30,000 for 2024-25, flat over the previous year’s output. “Right now, our production is a small per centage of the total demand, but there is a huge potential,” Hebbar added.
Other buyers
Besides Mondelez, there are other buyers such as Nestle and a host of domestic chocolate manufacturers sourcing cocoa from the Indian market. Mondelez is hardly able to get around 10,000 tonnes of cocoa from the Indian farmers as the domestic output is low, while it depends mainly on imports from Africa to meet its requirement of around 75,000 tonnes, sources said. However, the production and productivity is seen coming down in Africa due to lack of proper crop management and irrigation, they said.
“In India we are doing all the systematic management. We are teaching to farmers how to do proper irrigation, pruning, fertilizer application. Here the production is almost 1.5 kg to 2 kg of dry beans per acre per year. So that’s why we want to do some area expansion especially in the South. Also, we are planning to do some area expansion in the North East in states like Meghalaya. We have started the study in that region” sources said. Andhra leads the Indian cocoa production, followed by Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Experimenting with cocoa
Sources said farmers are also experimenting with cocoa as an intercrop in banana in Andhra and Karnataka. Farmers are taking to banana cultivation for the first two years as an intercrop with cocoa. In Andhra, cocoa is taken up as a monocrop in districts such as East Godavari, West Godavari, Krishna and Nellore among others.
