Chocolate represents many things to many people: An offering of love. A moment of pleasure. A source of comfort. To the families growing organic cacao in Ecuador, chocolate is a means for an improved way of life.

To earn a living, these families are farmers of cacao trees—chocolate’s sweet fruit. The San Carlos Cooperative, a 1,200 member strong farm alliance, seeks to overcome adversity and build a sustainable livelihood for their families while honoring and protecting Ecuador’s lush, natural environment.

Together we can make a huge difference in the lives of farmers who want to work hard to make their lives better.

The goals of Project Ecuador are:

• To provide farmers with the ability to meet the growing world-wide demand for premium, organic cacao
• To decrease small farmer migration to big cities looking for work
• To increase migration from cities to rural areas
• To encourage farmers to grow a legal crop, rather than more lucrative, yet dangerous and illegal
• To increase vegetation in areas that have been deforested, which in turn rebuilds habitat for indigenous species
• And ultimately to decrease poverty and increase financial stability using age-old farming techniques and the ethic of hard work that can lead to self-sustainability.

Training

Through Project Ecuador, four technical trainers have traveled by motor scooter to the Co-Op’s 52 communities to provide training on best practices for sustainable farming since July 2009. Training topics include everything from pruning techniques to homemade organic pesticide preparation using hot peppers. To date, the four trainers have trained nearly 1000 farmers in a 25-part training series. Tools including pruning shears and Stihl weed trimmers are used in the training process.

Trees

The Sacha Tree, which resulted from a naturally occurring hybrid on an independent farmer’s land, is inherently resistant to mold, 
fungus, insects and disease. Several thousand trees have now been created through careful and time-honored stem grafting from the original saplings.

Each Sacha Tree yields up to 100 cacao pods per harvest. Unlike a traditional cacao tree, the Sacha Tree does not have a growing season. It yields pods all year, a major breakthrough for farming in a region without defined meteorological seasons. And a major increase in production from the once-a-year, 12 – 15 pod per tree yield typical on many cacao farms.

With the Sacha Trees, independent farmers in the Orellana Region of Ecuador can now truly create sustainable lives for themselves and their families with as little as 1 to 4 hectares of farmable land. Project Ecuador is supporting the work of the San Carlos Cooperative in order to make this possible.