Back in February 2008, at the AAAS annual meeting which jump-started my interest in science in a global context, I attended several sessions that focused on African research institutions attempting to aid in the agricultural development of key crops. In particular, I remember one session that was devoted to work on the genetics of Cassava, with a long term goal of helping the small farmers who were dependent on cassava for both income and food security. Those talks made a big impression on me, and so I was thrilled that our intensive training (my first three months in Ghana) included a visit to the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana in the Eastern Region of the country, roughly three hours from the capital of Accra.

Cocoa production is one of the mainstays of Ghana’s economy, analogous to the role that coffee plays in Central America. Ghana and the Ivory Coast go back and forth over who is the largest exporter of cocoa in the world, but suffice to say that along with timber, gold mining, and tourism, cocoa is really important to Ghana and West Africa as a whole. My training group visited CRIG and were given a tour of their facilities, which include a variety of divisions focused on areas like plant pathology, pests, agricultural methods, and even a social science division which attempts probably the most difficult job of all, translating CRIG’s findings into methodology that Ghanaian cocoa farmers can use on their trees. Cocoa is a tree crop; the cocoa beans grow in pods that bud from the trunk and branches of the cocoa tree.

A detailed history is available on the website given above, so I won’t bother to recapitulate their various discoveries and contributions to cocoa production (which go back to the 1940’s, CRIG has a long and fascinating legacy). Just to choose one of the most significant, a great deal of their work has focused on developing hybrid species that produce fruit faster. When cocoa trees were originally brought to Ghana in the late 19th century, it took 8-10 years for a seedling to grow into a fruit producing tree (so I’m told). Patient work developing hybrids, much of it done at CRIG, has reduced that time to 2-3 years, an incredible boon to Ghanaian farmers. Cocoa trees produce for about 30 years before yields begin to decline, and the reduced length of time that the hybrids take to produce fruit allows farmers to replace trees with less of an impact on their livelihood.

For me, who has only done academic science in the context of undergraduate and graduate programs, it was a whole different world to visit a research organization that is embedded in the economic development of its country. Not to say that academic science doesn’t make important economic contributions, including in agriculture, but respect to CRIG for having such a direct impact on the fortunes of Ghanaian farmers.

And yes, yes, it’s all based on natural selection!