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Cocoa is a bittersweet crop for Indonesians plagued by low prices, pests

For some people, chocolate sums up the sweetness of life.

But there are few smiles among the cocoa farmers in Indonesia's main growing belt on the island of Sulawesi. Pests are ravaging crops and poor prices have made life very difficult.

As harvest time approaches, the green has turned to golden yellow in the rice fields lining the lush, hilly route to Pinrang, 150km north of Makassar, the provincial capital of South Sulawesi.

Nodi, 63, is a cocoa farmer who lives in a traditional wooden house on stilts in Pinrang. Brown-skinned and wrinkled, she cultivates hun-dreds of cocoa trees in her backyard, where weeds and leaves cover the ground.

As her grandchildren played nearby, Nodi, dressed in the headscarf dictated by Muslim custom and clothes with a batik print in brown and white, pointed to the cocoa pods on her trees.

They were ill, she explained. Pests had hollowed out the green football-shaped pods.

"Look, the outside looks all right," she said, slicing open a pod with a sharp knife. "But almost half of its inside is bad. My trees have been sick for a while."

Indonesia is the world's third-largest cocoa producer after Ivory Coast and Ghana.

In this part of the sprawling archipelago, small-scale farmers usually have cocoa plantations of around two to four hectares.

But pests and aging trees have cut cocoa yields to between 0.6 and 0.7 tonnes per hectare, well below potential yields of 1.5 tonnes. Low global prices have forced farmers to diversify into crops such as rice, vanilla and pepper to earn a living.

Weeds now flourish beneath cocoa trees, consuming whatever nutrition is left in the soil.

"It has become very hard to grow cocoa. The government doesn't show any intention at all to help us," said Hamidah, 40, another farmer.

"I don't think our kids want to become farmers. There's no future here. Many youngsters here have emigrated to Malaysia in search of jobs," she said.

The main harvest has begun in South Sulawesi, but many cocoa pods have been left hollow by the pod borer pest.

The worm-like creatures enter the cocoa beans to feed. They have plagued the island since the 1980s, but only became an uncontrollable menace in 1999.

"The beans are now so small. It's not like it used to be, when trees were healthy and beans were solid," said Nodi's husband, Abdul Karim, who started cultivating cocoa more than 20 years ago.

About 300,000 small-scale cocoa farmers live in South Sulawesi, which accounts for 75 percent of Indonesia's output, together with the two neighboring provinces of Central and Southeast Sulawesi.

Industry officials say elimination of the pod borer is impractical, but its spread could be minimized if farmers took better care of their crop. The problem is that many cocoa trees have become disease-prone because of a lack of fertilizers.

TINY MARGIN

"We don't apply fertilizers anymore because they are so expensive," said Karim, sitting bare-chested on a rattan chair and holding a cane.

"I am lucky that I have three hectares of rice fields which produce well. Otherwise, it will be hard to survive," he said.

Ex-farm cocoa is being offered at around 10,000 rupiah (US$1.16) a kilo, down from around 12,000 rupiah last year, reflecting an increase in supply not only in Indonesia but globally.

Production costs in Sulawesi run about 9,000 rupiah a kilo.

Agriculture experts expect Indonesia to produce 460,000 tonnes of beans in the year to September from 386,000 tonnes the previous year because of favorable weather before the harvest that farmers are processing. Drought hit last year's harvest badly.

"Price has become a problem. Farmers are barely able to make ends meet," said Halim Razak, chairman of the South Sulawesi chapter of the Indonesian Cocoa Association.

"Life is hard for farmers in Sulawesi. Cocoa pod borer is there. Once it hits an area, it is very difficult to deal with," he said.

Many farmers feel nostalgic for the days when prices peaked at around 20,000 rupiah per kilo in 1998 at the height of Indonesia's political and economic crisis. The profit helped farmers buy motorcycles and electronic items and repair homes.

Although Indonesia's rupiah has stabilized, prices of essentials and fertilizers remain high. Fertilizer is now sold at 60,000 rupiah for a 50kg bag, compared with 20,000 rupiah before the economic crisis.

Indonesia exports cocoa beans chiefly to the US, the world's second-largest grinder. It also sells beans to grinders in Asia, but a lack of fermented, higher-quality beans has hampered efforts to attract European buyers.

Volatile prices give farmers little incentive to ferment their beans. Fermentation takes at least five days, during which prices can fall further.

"We don't pay much attention to the plantations any longer. I mean, we just let cocoa grow but we don't maintain the trees," said Andi Ambu, a farmer who grows cocoa with her husband.

"We don't have time to ferment the beans. We need the money quickly to buy soap, sugar and kerosene," she said, adding that her husband had opened a welding shop to help provide more income to feed the family's six young children.
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