Will Rapid Testing Save the World’s Chocolate? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Food Fight

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Episode: Will Rapid Testing Save the World’s Chocolate?

Author: EIT Food
Duration: 00:18:29

Episode Shownotes

In this special documentary episode, we take a deep dive into the global crisis threatening one of the world’s most beloved treats: chocolate. Cocoa Swollen Shoot Viral Disease (CSSVD) is decimating cocoa crops in West Africa, endangering the livelihoods of millions of farmers and pushing up the price of cocoa

to unprecedented levels. Gianpaolo Rando, co-founder of SwissDeCode, breaks down how innovative rapid testing technology could be the solution to save cocoa trees, stop the spread of disease, and secure the future of chocolate.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Paper or plastic? Oh, I forgot my own bags. Plastic. No, wait, paper. Hang on, which one's better? I don't know. Don't stress, Neil. The podcast Living Planet is here to help.

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00:00:23 Speaker_01
For answers to these environmental conundrums and your questions, subscribe to Living Planet wherever you listen to podcasts.

00:00:32 Speaker_03
Hi everyone, I'm Matt Eason. Welcome to one of our special docu-episodes. In these explorative deep dives, we tackle the big questions within the food system, uncovering fascinating stories of innovation and change.

00:00:46 Speaker_03
Time to further explore the groundbreaking ideas and incredible people driving the future of food.

00:00:54 Speaker_02
Rich, smooth and universally adored, chocolate is a small luxury with a big role in our lives.

00:01:02 Speaker_00
My first memory about chocolate as an Italian, we had this ice cream in the summer, which is wrapped in chocolate. And I remember going on the seaside and asking my mother, when is the 4 p.m.? 4 p.m. is the time you're allowed to get your sweets.

00:01:18 Speaker_00
And having this chocolate and the ice cream together was, yeah, a great memory.

00:01:24 Speaker_02
But what if the source of this beloved treat, the cocoa plant, faced an existential crisis? What if the chocolate we loved could, one day, disappear from our shelves? The world's love affair with chocolate is under threat. And the culprit?

00:01:43 Speaker_02
A roofless virus called Cocoa Swollen Shoot Disease, or CSSVD, which has decimated millions of hectares of cocoa trees in West Africa. threatening both our chocolate supply and the livelihoods of farmers who rely on it.

00:01:59 Speaker_02
This could imply that we will not see chocolate for Christmas. In a world where traditional farming practices struggle to keep pace, could rapid testing be the lifeline that Kokoa desperately needs?

00:02:13 Speaker_00
Hello, my name is Gianpaolo Rando. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Swisticode, a company based in Switzerland. We are helping farmers and food manufacturers to grow high quality sustainable food.

00:02:26 Speaker_02
Gianpaolo shares how Swisticode's rapid testing technology is not only making early disease detection possible, but might be the game changer that allows cocoa to thrive despite rising environmental threats.

00:02:41 Speaker_00
I don't know if you ever see one cocoa plant. I turned 40 before ever seeing one. Cocoa trees are a very picky plant, to be honest.

00:02:51 Speaker_00
They are a small plant, maybe 2-3 meters high, and they are very picky in terms of what environment they like to grow and having fruits. This is both in terms of temperature, in terms of humidity,

00:03:05 Speaker_00
But also in terms of sun exposure, they don't like really sun and they like to be in the shadow.

00:03:11 Speaker_00
And this is already a challenge when you are thinking about production, you're thinking about plants that need photosynthesis to produce, and you have a plant that is a bit shy, introverted plant that doesn't like to be exposed to the sunlight.

00:03:26 Speaker_00
There are other challenges around the pollination. The cocoa flowers are very small. So there are only a few insects that are actually able to get inside the flower and pollinate and transform the flower into the fruit.

00:03:39 Speaker_00
Because of these challenges, today in the world, cocoa can grow only on a small, narrow belt around the equatorial line. This is in West Africa, Ivory Coast and Ghana. And climate change is now changing.

00:03:56 Speaker_00
And these cocoa trees are getting more vulnerable to diseases. And because they are already picky, plus the diseases are getting there, it is now the fourth consecutive year where the cocoa production worldwide is going down. Demand is going up.

00:04:12 Speaker_00
If you think about cocoa prices in the last 10 years, the average price per one ton of cocoa beans was around 2 to 3 thousand euro per ton. Last year, 2023, the price closed at around 4,000.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
This year, at the moment we are speaking now, the price is oscillating between 10,000 to 7,500. It's reaching a price tag which is typical of metals, like copper.

00:04:46 Speaker_00
And who will think that when you buy cocoa, you are buying something that is as precious as a metal? That's what's happening today. The disease we are talking is called Cocoa Swollen Shoot Viral Disease, CSSVD.

00:05:05 Speaker_00
It's a long name, but it's essentially COVID for the cocoa tree. We could even say this is the ebola of the cocoa tree, because there is no remission. Once the cocoa tree is infected, in a couple of years it's going to die.

00:05:19 Speaker_00
There is no way the cocoa is getting back into a healthy status. It is a virus.

00:05:25 Speaker_00
Like any virus, the virus is hijacking the cells of the plant, in this case, and is diverting the metabolism of the plant instead of producing cocoa fruits to produce more virus. That's the way it works. As any other virus, it's an infectious agent.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
So you have small insects called mealbugs that are landing on a leaf of the cocoa tree. They are eating the leaf, and they're getting the virus with them.

00:05:54 Speaker_00
And when they're flying and they're moving into another coconut tree, by eating the leaf, they're actually injecting the virus into the other plant. And that makes so that the virus is propagating and the disease is propagating as well.

00:06:09 Speaker_00
The magnitude of this disease today is quite huge. The latest estimate, we have more than one million hectare that have been wiped out. because of the diseases. So this is one million hectare of cocoa land that is now destroyed and is not producing.

00:06:27 Speaker_00
How much is this one million hectare? You can think about 1.4 million soccer fields. Or to stay on the agriculture, this would be more or less the size of the agricultural land of a major European country like Netherlands.

00:06:45 Speaker_00
So, of course, there is more land that is producing cocoa, but we have a deficit of one million hectares that are gone. The risk, if we are not getting this disease under control, is more pervasive than only cocoa production.

00:07:05 Speaker_00
Think more about the human mankind. We have millions of families that today rely on cocoa production as the main source of income.

00:07:14 Speaker_00
And in this one million hectares lost, we are talking about millions of families that are not getting their basic living income from cocoa today.

00:07:24 Speaker_00
And they will need to rethink and change their strategies to find a way to sustain their life, to win their bread. Cocoa is also one of the player of bilateral agreements between other countries. So if European countries cannot import cocoa,

00:07:42 Speaker_00
Bilateral agreements are going in two ways. It also means from the European industry that we will not be able then to export our technologies or our services to these countries, because the market goes in two ways.

00:07:54 Speaker_00
We are losing on a sweet note about chocolate, but the implication could be more severe. When you think about diseases, there are many solutions that came up to solve the problem of disease. I will use COVID because it's in everyone's mind.

00:08:13 Speaker_00
First reaction about when you have a viral disease is to run away. In the past, when the farmers were observing the disease, they would run away. That means running away from a farm that is infected.

00:08:29 Speaker_00
taking more land from the rainforest, cutting the trees and planting cocoa trees instead in an area where supposedly there is no disease. Now, in Europe, there is a new law coming up that will be effective in December this year.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
It's called the EUDR, European Deforestation Regulation. And what this law tells the industry is that it's not possible anymore to import cocoa from areas that are in active deforestation. So running away and getting more land is not possible anymore.

00:09:08 Speaker_00
We have the one million hectare lost of cocoa that we need to find a way to remediate and put into a plantation because we cannot take more virgin rainforest today. A second solution, and you will laugh about that, is about social distancing.

00:09:25 Speaker_00
You know, with COVID we had to stay far away one to each other. That should apply to trees as well. How do you make distance between trees?

00:09:35 Speaker_00
You can do that, but in a way that means having less production because you will have less trees in a hectare, for example.

00:09:43 Speaker_00
There are some good, promising work working on so-called agroforestry systems, where you have multiple trees together, and the farmer is taking the crop of cocoa and is selling it, but is also harvesting other crops, providing different sources of income.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
Agricultural agroforestry is promising, and even though today a minority of the land is converted into this system, in the future we will observe more of these systems that are more respectful to nature as well.

00:10:21 Speaker_00
Another solution that was implemented during COVID is wearing masks as a barrier. And if you think about what is the equivalent of a mask in a cocoa plantation, there are actually some trees that can act as a barrier.

00:10:38 Speaker_00
For example, it has been observed that coffee trees are an effective barrier against the disease. What's happening is you have the insect that is carrying the virus, posing on a leaf from the coffee tree,

00:10:54 Speaker_00
is eating the leaf of the coffee instead of the leaf of the cocoa tree, and the virus cannot grow into the coffee. So the virus is getting lost. It's like if the insect is washing his hands, is washing his mouth, right?

00:11:07 Speaker_00
And the virus stays into the coffee and eventually dies there. And when the insect is moving and is going into the cocoa tree, it's clean. So this is a vegetal barrier.

00:11:20 Speaker_00
Now all these solutions about land remediation, about putting in place new agroforestry systems, about creating barriers for protection of the virus, in a way or the other rely on the capacity to measure the efficacy of these systems.

00:11:39 Speaker_00
Let's just make a simple example. We spoke about coffee as a barrier, but how wide the barrier should be? We're talking about one meter, we're talking about 10 meters. What is effective and how do you know that is effective? You need to measure, right?

00:11:52 Speaker_00
If you don't measure, you don't manage. Measuring during COVID was done by PCR testing.

00:12:00 Speaker_00
With PCR you are able to identify the viral DNA and tell persons that are infected, you can even tell when they are asymptomatic, so you are not coughing, but you are covering the virus. The same is for trees. You can eventually do PCR on trees.

00:12:16 Speaker_00
You're taking the leaf and you do the PCR, and you will see if the virus is present or not, and you can have a general map of where the virus is at the moment.

00:12:26 Speaker_00
This you can get with the satellite as well, but with the satellite you can only see the symptoms, you can only see the tree that is dying.

00:12:33 Speaker_00
But there is a long latent asymptomatic phase, more than two years old, where the plant, the trees are propagating the disease, but they're not showing symptoms. So that's why you need PCR testing. Problem is, we are talking about Ecuador.

00:12:52 Speaker_00
We are talking about land where there are no roads. There is no cold chain. There is no way you can take a PCR test and run it at scale into these countries. That's also why this country suffered so much for COVID.

00:13:08 Speaker_00
And if people suffered from COVID, Cocoa trees I mean, it's an order of priorities. They're going to suffer even more. This is where SwissDecode provide new solutions to measure and manage the disease and the agricultural chain of tropical areas.

00:13:27 Speaker_00
Cosa Swiss decoded by helping farmers and food manufacturers to grow high quality sustainable foods by providing the first mile testing, inspection and certification schemes using a new technology, a technology that is allowing to measure the presence of the disease via DNA testing.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
but in a way that is conducible to those countries. We simplified the test in a way that can be done by a person with minimal training.

00:13:57 Speaker_00
We simplified the equipment in a way that can be carried in a 4x4 car or even on a motorbike, which is the typical locomotion mode of traveling inside the plantations.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
And we simplified the results in the user experience so that the results can actually be obtained into this country with a relatively simple manufacturing process as well. Last but not least, we removed the need for cold chain.

00:14:27 Speaker_00
So there is no need to bring consumables and to bring reactive into frozen status, which is what's happening today for the PCR test.

00:14:37 Speaker_00
But we now validated in both countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana, that the kit survives the temperature, humidity of these tropical countries. When we think about impacts, I believe that we are providing support at many levels.

00:14:53 Speaker_00
Something that I have seen in the last months is we are a bit of a catalyser for the cocoa industry to come together.

00:15:01 Speaker_00
If in the last years every trader and every cocoa manufacturer would consider the other players as competitors, today we are in a state of emergency where everybody is trying to help each other.

00:15:18 Speaker_00
And having a test that can be done by different players and having the test data shared among players helps to have the full picture of the disease today.

00:15:31 Speaker_00
Now we cannot tackle the problem alone, but if as an industry we are coming together, and this is happening now where we have

00:15:39 Speaker_00
For example, a project which we are doing together with Mars, together with Mondeles, together with the Swiss Sustainability Cocoa Association, together with some other European chocolate players like Stork in Germany.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
And instead of being competitors, we are all sharing data about these test results. And this allows us to have the best picture of the disease and then finding the best way to intervene.

00:16:07 Speaker_00
In the future, we are working pre-competitively with all these major players, putting together all their collections, all their genetic collections, clean this collection from viruses, and then see which one of these variants, we're talking about more than 1,000 variants, more than 1,000 different genetic cocoa varieties, are A,

00:16:33 Speaker_00
resisting better to the disease and be producing in a good way into those countries. Because we have this one million hectares that we have to re-put into production. We cannot cut more virgin forests.

00:16:46 Speaker_00
And it's better if we find the right varieties and the right protocols to make it happen. So the test is a way to verify that the tree is responding well or not so well to the virus and is giving an early alert about the virus presence.

00:17:05 Speaker_00
But the test itself is only a tool and working together as an industry, bringing new tools is the way forward. Working together, collaborating together.

00:17:24 Speaker_03
This has been the Food Fight podcast. As ever, if you'd like to find out more about what we do, head over to the EIT Food website at www.eitfood.eu. Also, please join the conversation via the hashtag EITFoodFight on our X channel at EIT Food.

00:17:41 Speaker_03
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