Ivo Rovira y Ana Ponce
The private files
Self-portrait in the fermentation area, Peru.
About Cacao Collective 90,000 km traveled through 11 countries seeking to discover the secrets of cocoa through its protagonists. Cacao Collective is a documentary divided in 12 thematic chapters in which we discover cocoa from all its aspects. Cacao Collective is also a travel journal written and photographed along the entire length of the journey. Time went by very fast and now the project is finished. What you will find here, is the most intimate part of Cacao Collective. Our experiences, anecdotes and encounters. Our favourite images. Our emotions. Ivo Rovira & Ana Ponce.
The beginning. Today, 19th of June 2014, is the beginning of everything. To express it better, today is the day when we’re going to start traveling after more than 6 frantic months doing researches, preparing the script, the logistics and the production of #CocoaCollective, in which we will travel to the tropics in search of people who will answer to all the doubts, confusions and lack of knowledge surrounding the world of Cocoa. Cocoa Barry, in a bet without fissures to discover the origins, aromas and unknown stories surrounding this fruit, gives us all the confidence and the economic support needed for an adventure of this magnitude. Our filming equipment, audio and photo is already distributed in the two backpacks and handbags that will be checked-in in a few hours. Minimum amount of clothes, above all good footwear which for sure will take us to almost inaccessible places. Sitting on the sofa at home, we both check everything again and again. There is no option for oblivion. We look at each other with emotion, uncertainty and eager to get started with a project which began to gestate more than 6 months ago, #CocoaCollective. In a few hours we’ll fly to Lima, the capital of Peru. In Quechua and Aymara: Piruw. We turn off the water and gas, we check that the plants are flooded to ensure they won’t get thirsty and slamming the door we start to leave our life behind… we have started to travel… tomorrow we will cross the first customs office that will lead us to know the origin of cocoa, the earth and the climate where it all began. .
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Howler monkeys in the shade trees cocoa. Mexico.
Arriving to Lima. We go along the Avenue Arequipa in the opposite way of the sea. A white sky covers Lima and the traffic noise is deafening. During our journey by foot or with a microbus, we come across many street vendors, graffitis with colorful slogans, well kept parks filled with teenagers publicly showing their love, dogs which should not be in such overcrowded streets. Our shoes catch their attention: sandals without socks. Here it´s winter but the temperature is of 21º C. Televisions announce anti-flu products. Our body has almost assumed the 14 hours flight from home and the 7 hours time difference. The Avenue Arequipa is endless. According to our notes, we already should have arrived at the head office of APPCocoa, the association of Peruvian cocoa producers. But this is not the case and we carry on wandering, stopping some pedestrians now and then, with our street map in our hands, trying to find our way. The people from Lima are friendly and helpful even if they don´t show much interest when answering.
from Barcelona. They greet us very kindly, delighted to have us coming from Europe in order to talk about their cocoa. They open a map and without a moment´s hesitation they show us the place where we should be going in order to get the closest to the origin of cocoa. His finger points out a blue and green flake on the map; water and trees, the cradle of the mother plant. Bagua Grande. Two faltering phone calls due to the bad connection with the Amazon Region, two suggestions, three opinions on how to get there and all is said. We shake hands and we go out delighted.
We enjoy getting lost while observing awesome the organization and life of such a city. Lima is chaotic, huge and somehow decadent. The sunlight filtered by the white contaminated clouds always gives the cities this heavy atmosphere. Our first contact with Peruvian cocoa takes place at 12h40, in an austere and functional office. A table fills three quarters of the space as well as a showcase cupboard with trophies, commemorative plaques and others distinctions. On the walls, a black board filled with numbers and measures and a huge map showing the cooperatives of the Peruvian cocoa producers. A projector lights the room with a colorful PowerPoint. We just arrived in the middle of a working meeting. They know who we are, they´ve read our last week mail sent
Arequipa Avenue. Lima.
Street scene. Lima.
Self-portrait travelling on the local bus. Lima.
One hour flight from Lima to Tarapoto, 10 hours bus ride from Tarapoto to Bagua Grande. The green color of the trees varies throughout the journey. Here as everywhere around the globe, green remains the most difficult color to photograph. Each curve discovers new trees, each tree discovers a new curve. We start in the afternoon from Tarapoto´s bus station, heading directly to the jungle, the Peruvian Amazon Region. There we expect to reach the Amazonian original plantations of Criollo cocoa. It´s the beginning of everything. The starting point of our documentary. Tarapoto bus station. Peru.
On the bus to Bagua Grande.
On the way to the jungle. Bagua Grande is neither big nor nice. The Utcubamba river splits the city in two. One single bridge connects the shores. Far behind we can see the rice fields, farms and even further the jungle and the cocoa´s plantations. We choose the hotel Rio to live and work during our stay. We call our contact in the cooperative and fixe our appointment. Tomorrow at 8, we´ll go to a plantation located by the closest spot of the jungle. They are concise, they don´t ask too many questions, only one advice: “bring boots, water and be willing to walk…” After 4 hours ride along trails with our 4 wheeled Pick-up, we arrive at a point where our car can´t move any further. The earthy trail fades away between the trees, stones and weeds. Outside the temperature reaches 34ºC, it´s 12´o clock in the morning. We load our material on our backs, looking at each other cheerfully and collusive, we start our trek. Accompanied by Nancy and Ever, agricultural technician and manager of the cooperative CEPROAA, both acting as guides and botanic instructors, we enter a landscape that absorbs us. We hardly have time to understand where we are. The zigzagging trail drawn on the ground becomes in a few minutes a trap for foreigners like us. Ana, walking behind all of us, screams and sinks, swallowed by this fertile and muddy earth. I turn around, try to extend my arm in order to help her and my boot remains behind in the move. Ahead, Ever and Nancy walk carelessly smiling with a stalk hanging from their lips. Their steps are steady. All kind of insects, flying or not, greet us with joy and hunger. They seem to welcome us in the tropic and the BIO plantations. Still 4 hours of hard and ascendant trek ahead. The trees, the plantations, the jungle, they all seem to be getting closer slowly, very slowly.
All of the sudden, there it is. Cocoa! One lush tree about 10 meters high, with big green leaves, proud to exhibit its red and orange colored fruits. After more than 24 hours´ journey and 11.000 Km, our hero appears. In the distance we distinguish a house. Calisto and his family, live here since many generations, making their living from their fields and for their fields. Far away from humankind, electricity and communications. Their donkeys and legs as only locomotion means, they greet us with their mouths wide open with surprise and disbelieve. We think that no one not belonging to the agricultural world ever came here. Ever and Nancy introduce us and after a few minutes, Calisto and his son Salomé guide us into the cocoa plantation. Cocoa abounds exuberant, sheltered by fruit trees with names we can´t remember. It seems that each tree and each herb has here a function. “…this tree is used for its wood, this one is a fruit tree, this plant is healing, the other one here lowers fever…” Scarcely 10 minutes after, we lose our orientation. We can´t cope with such an amount of information. The ground creaks and it seems to be moving and coming into being. The leaves from the cocoa trees, the banana trees, together with worms, spiders, empty cocoa shells…everything is compost, everything is life. The hustle and bustle of the plantation is constant. Men harvest, insects as well, and our arms and legs start feeling soared. Calisto and Salomé don´t look distressed by our filmmaking crew who follows them everywhere recording every single word and whisper. We drop down the ripe fruits and shortly after using a blunt blade machete, we discover the secrets hidden in this special fruit. The sound made by the metal breaking the shell is dry and empty. Two lengthwise cuts and his hands open the fruit. Inside, countless seeds, living united, covered by a white pulp called murcilago. Calisto takes with no hesitation a handful of those seeds and puts them in his mouth. 5 seconds later he spits them out. The gesture on his face shows his approval with what he just tasted. “it´s ready for harvesting…” he says.
Cocoa among the forest.
View from the bus window on the way to Bagua Grande.
On the way to the plantation of Amazonian cocoa, Santa Fe.
Woman at the door of his house waiting to get freshly picked cocoa. Lamas, Peru.
Landscape in the San Martin region. Peru.
Filming the arrival to the Calisto plantation. Sante Fe. Peru.
In Lamas, 70% of farmers produce cocoa. Graffiti at the entrance of the town.
The fruit. Calisto, Salomé and her brother-in-law quickly distribute the trees between each other. Armed with pruning shears and a stick ending with a sickle, they start knocking down the ripe fruits. They select them according to their colors and sizes. But sometimes they need to hit the fruits with their knuckles to make sure they are mature. The fruits fall down at once, remaining fixed in the ground. The scene is played throughout the plantation. We turn over and see all the women of the family gathering the pods on one unique pile. Crack, crack, crack! Using a machete they split the pods one after the other and pour the in a white plastic bucket. Theobroma cocoa, the food of the Gods. Still today we keep on thinking how appropriate this name is… The first thing you feel when you put into your mouth the freshly extracted cocoa seeds is a marvelous sensation of freshness which totally contrast with the ambient temperature. They´re as cold as if you had just taken them out of the fridge… after this fantastic freshness, a wide range of flavors appears almost painfully taking your breath away. The yogurt like texture of the pulp or “murcilago” hides flavors of flowers, fruits, caramel and sugar. Flowers and fruits flavored yogurt would be the best way to define it. A food for Gods and humans… We return to the hotel Rio tired and happy after spending all day with Calisto´s family. We listened to their life, their history, their songs…sharing with them Creole hen with rice that they only eat on special occasions…they told us that we just arrived at the end of the rainy season. Around here they live with it for 4 months in a row, something unbelievable for us. We ask Salome how it is possible to live watching the rain all day long in this place with no asphalt or infrastructures. All at once they answer: “wearing a plastic to go to the fields, no more…”
Landscape of cocoa trees in the forest.
Peruvian Amazonian Cocoa at different times of maturity.
Roosters and cui. On the next day, we take a mototaxi and head to the CEPROAA, the cooperative gathering tens of small cocoa farmers from the Amazonian region of Peru… Jose Éver shows us the infrastructures, the cascade fermentation plants, and the other one for drying…Workers are passionate and tireless. Later, a member of the cooperative invites us to the inauguration of a new Coliseum dedicated to cockfighting. We arrive there without knowing what for…once again, an experience that won´t probably happen again even if we liked being there. We also had the opportunity to eat “cui”, a kind of guinea pig, which is a delicatessen around here. A new day. A little bit dizzy after a long night among roosters, music and cui, we go back with the night bus to Juanjui.
Self-portrait on the motorcycle.
Cui drying in the sun.
Cockfight.
Alto El Sol. Province of San Martin. The community we are visiting is far away from the district. In the past, although not so much, the inhabitants used wooden canoes to reach this zone. At that time there were no watches and the common sentence among them was: “we must go back while the sun is still up in the sky to arrive soon in Pachiza”. This explains the name of the place we are visiting, Alto el Sol (Up the Sun).
We leave the place sailing down the river, without using the engine, silently… We are thankful to the black clouds which hide the sun. The boat makes us feel tire, the landscape of the jungle relaxes us. On board, we, 30 bags of cocoa and two men. The boat with a cow loaded in the morning overtakes us, sailing to an even more remote destination. We close our eyes and fall asleep.
In the 80´s, this place was another bastion of terrorism and traffic of drogues. In the 90´s they were told that they were crazy. In those days, replacing coca cultivation by cocoa was impossible to understand. The fight against those who controlled coca production was strong and dangerous, and the price of one kilo of cocoa was extremely low. In 2006, their cocoa was recognized one of the best in the world at the Paris Chocolate Show. Tenacity and strength of three farmers led by Ramiro, got imitated by many others. Today cocoa plantations are spread throughout the territory. We spend all day between plantations and fermentation boxes. David Contreras, a technician of Alto El Sol, gives us all the information about how to produce high quality cocoa. Together with him, the first three farmers who started this trick. These three men fought against a culture that didn´t interest nor belong to them and created their own. Their eyes, hands and words reflect the pride of achieving to produce a unique cocoa which is sold all over the world, fighting against the recent history of their country, the fear and threats of death. They say good bye to us after inviting us for a meal made of rice, chicken, mango and orange juice. On these lands, fishing nets are also used to ferment cocoa. Admired, we observe the investigation of this new technique.
Today, back to Europe after travelling more than 5000 km. Tangible memories are still with us: hearth in our boots, sun marks on the skin, countless insect bites on our body, leaves from a fruit tree in some of our pockets. How long will it take before they disappear? The intangible memories are uncountable: flavors, smells of flowers and acetic acid, words in other languages, walks through a jungle that surrounds everything, laughs and incomprehension when disappearing up to knee high swallowed by the mud. All those, tangible and intangible memories remind us the same, a fruit with a great character, produced under other trees which give it shade. Cocoa, with capital letters and with proper name is already the third companion on this trip around the world. …next stop Mexico.
Sunrise on the Huayabamba river.
Interior of a house near the pier.
Fresh cocoa freshly harvested.
Transportation of dry cocoa. From the canoe to the truck.
Filming in the Huayabamba river on the way to the plantation.
Arrive to Mexico Federal District. Here we are, two more people among more than 21,000000 citizens. We wander with no aim, no GPS, no Google Maps, with no orienting tip or anything to tell us where we are except for the people. They shout while selling everything, offering you the assurance of your future and the cleaning of your aura. Smoke, water, incense, oil, bitumen, grass…the smell of a replete city. It´s Sunday. We let people who know where they´re going to push us and make our bodies spin around. Almost by chance, we appear in the Cathedral, in front of the Christ of Cocoa, sitting in the dark, waiting for our venue. Monday morning we head to the Centro de Desarollo Indigena (Indigene Development Center) of Mexico city, where they help us plan our trip. Telephone numbers, addresses, names, maps and some tips about Tabasco. Tomorrow we´ll fly to Villahermosa, Tabasco.
Arriving to Mexico D.F.
Christ of the cocoa in the Cathedral of Mexico D.F. Saleswoman through the streets of Mexico D.F.
First step in Tabasco. The inhabitants of Tabasco carry on their shoulders the “culture of water”: tropical jungles, swamps and lagoons covered by mangrove. Water has always surrounded them. The temperature is of 38º C and humidity reaches 60%. It´s as you were breathing water and as if the water you drink was swallowed by your pores in the second you take it. The Chontales indigenous gain ground to the water, building huge platforms with earth and empty cocoa shells. The platforms are called “camellones Chontales” and are used for agriculture. They live and cultivate on those lands won to the water. Bernardino accompanies us through the “camellones”. He works for the CDI of Tabasco. In his Mayan language he explains to us how people live and fish around here… We hardly can distinguish between earth and water, between fields and wild nature. Colors and shapes get confused. We film, take pictures and record sounds of all this. Our legs covered with mosquito bites are the testimony that this place is not suitable for us. They laugh and try to make move the iguana which is staring at us in order to get a better view with our camera.
and his daughter Kenya receive us in their home. The farm animals rest under the cocoa trees which sleep under the fruit trees. We choose a shady place and start our interview. We listen at how has been the life of their community from the times of their ancestors up to the present times. Their cocoa trees don´t produce anymore, the witch broom disease is killing them: “can you imagine how I feel when I buy pozol to the lady who comes with her cart! who knows where this cocoa comes from !”. Pozol, something so rooted to their palate and culture, is starting to disappear from their daily routine. The jicara (mug used to drink pozol) is getting dry. We leave two hours later with a new story to share. A story told in nahuatl, a language spoken by one and a half million of people in Mexico, most of them also bilingual in Spanish. After a day in his company we continue our journey towards Comalcalco.
Buying pozol, something strange for Marcos Cruz. Pozol, from the nahuatl word pozolli, is a thick beverage prepared with cocoa and fermented corn. Its origin is from Mesoamerica and is still very popular in the south of Mexico, especially in the state of Tabasco where it´s the traditional drink of indigenous communities. The sun rises and the temperature is high. We drive our white Chevrolet following Agenor and Bernardino. We enter into the nahuatl community. Marcos Cruz, farmer,
The streets of Tucta a holiday.
Chontales ridged in the region of Tabasco.
Marcos Cruz, farmer, with his daughter inside his house.
White cocoa. White cocoa or Cocoa Porcelain. The white from Java or Tabasco, the favourite of Soldevila, contains very volatiles notes of red fruits and a citrus acidity, its aroma integrates notes of raisins and dried plums. We discover it in the south of Mexico, with a stifling heat. The sun makes its whiteness dazzle and make us want to taste its freshness even more. We love it…and we will taste it again in Java. Swamps and pejelagarto.
We say goodbye to the chontal Maya community eating pejelagarto (freshwater fish) in green sauce, on the banks of the mangrove swamps, in front of us nomadic lilies slowly swim from side to side, we know that not far away goblins have been closely observing us. Tomorrow we will leave this land full of traditions and dishes which seem to come from an invented world: pejelagarto, turtles in blood…I don’t think we will ever forget it. If you are in the area of Sentla, don’t hesitate to go and eat in Chak Traj.
Tucta is full. A small church located in the middle of the village accommodates an infinite number of events these days.Tucta is celebrating. During the day they cook in the shade and we eat inside the church, taking advantage of the cool temperature always present in this type of places. In the afternoon the locals offer fruits from the cocoa tree to their Saint, in a ritual combining Christian and some animist beliefs The entire village celebrates. During the evening, with 40º and surrounded by loads of mosquitoes coming from the swamps that surround the place, we witness one of the oldest dances of Tabasco with strong pre-Hispanic roots, the “Baila Viejo” coming from Nacajuca. Flutes, drums, traditional clothes and wood carved masks with long hairs, all this accompanied by a community proud of its culture. Close to here, we visit Maria Eugenia, a chontal Maya woman who has lived 73 years on this land. We talk with her about the culture inherited from her ancestors and about cocoa. Her house and her kitchen seems to be open to everyone and to us. The dishes she prepares are delicious, the small baskets she makes with palm tree leaf end up travelling in our bags.
Cocoa flower.
Cocoa trees.
Cocoa pods.
Filming the cocoa seedlings.
Pejelagarto in green sauce, Tabasco.
Cooking fish on the shore of the blue lagoon, Sentla, Tabasco.
Cocoa offering in the church of Tucta during the fe
Caretaker of crocodiles and turtles. Tabasco
estivities. Tabasco.
Lunch at noon during the festivities of Tucta. Tabasco.
Food, currency and archeology.
Mexico city, history, anthropology and cooking.
Salary. The word comes from the Roman Empire, where often soldiers were paid with salt; hard to get and very expensive as it was one of the few ways they had to preserve the meat. The use of cocoa as a currency takes us to the Mayan empire. It was not of common use for the people, mostly upper class citizens used it for commercial trade.
We have settled our general headquarters in the centre of Mexico city. An historical building which perhaps will helps us find some more inspiration and strength to continue with our adventure. Near to our computer and filming equipment, two other essential things: the insecticide and a roll of toilet paper. The food and the pozol which accompanied us around Tabasco do not forgive.
Standing in front of the big Mayan temple of Comalcalco, we try to forget the 21th century in order to have a better understanding of the explanation from our guide Benito… we look at a low relief with a monkey holding a cocoa pod in its hands. It represents the Earth… we start to understand everything. We start understanding how valuable this fruit was in those times, before Spanish conquest… The actual story of cocoa would be different or wouldn´t exist without the Mayas. They domesticated it when they planted it in their patios and used it as currency and food. Seeds had a sacred meaning among antique pre-Hispanic cultures. The natural wealth which derived from these plants gave some importance to the area in addition to the commercial activities developed from the ceremonial center of Comalcalco. The farm of Cholula shares its location with the archeological site of the city. In the rear part of the terrain of the plantation we find some mounds which hide archeological remains. The old settlers of the area developed the same activity as the one actually carried on the farm: the growth and harvest of cocoa. Fruit and wooden trees give their shade again to this fruit and above them the howling monkeys are resting and ignoring us. After this long walk between plants and past, Liliana prepares the traditional Chocoalt with honey and spices.
There are 300,000 students in the University of Mexico, it’s a small city. Listening to Maria del Carmen, we have the feeling she was with Hernán Cortés when he disembarqued in Mexico and met Moctezuma. As if she ate with them, took a walk with them and visited the temples with them. She represents all the knowledge of that time. Our interview, we imagine, is very different from the one these two men had. 31st of July 2014, the three of us alone seating in one of the classrooms of the empty University in August, white chairs, white desks and a blackboard, aseptic as ours. 8th of November 1519, at the confluence of the streets República del Salvador with Avenida Pino Suárez, according to the current historical centre of Mexico. Observing the drawings of those days, we see that a complete entourage surrounded them, bare feet, boots, helmets, feathers and carpets. We don’t need a translator for a language that is our own. Hernán Cortés did need one, he was lucky to find a Spanish shipwrecked man who had been living with the Mayas and who could help him understand the language. Listening to her is as if we were listening to Gonzalo Guerrero, Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, it’s like we could see the room where they sat and the offerings they exchanged. A friendly meeting that would end in a great battle later.
Self-portrait in the hotel room in Mexico D.F.
Colonia Villa Coyoacan. Yuriria opens up her home. Carrying our material on our backs, we start dodging objects in the room, maps, magnifiers, cocoa and drawers full of spices, boxes that contain other boxes, family photos, political images of the left-wing, plates on the walls, and a dog. We begin to know in which world we are entering, a world of culture, research, and above all, food. Using words of Juan José Millás “such apparent disorder metaphorized actually a return to order”. We decided to break the silence enveloping us stirring with the spoon a freshly prepared milk tea... and started to speak. She tells us that cocoa is a sign of Mexican identity, defends vigorously polyculture, native food made in small kitchens, and the seed of cocoa for its aromatic and flavourings properties. We talk and she speaks of all the virtues of the plant which travels with us. Yuriria defines herself anthropologist of food and ethno-cook. We leave her home and her memories with new recipes in our minds made of humanity, culture and cuisine. We will return soon to try her mole, national dish of Mexico, with chicken. And so the days occur full of experiences and encounters, when even a story hasn’t finished almost another starts. And we continue weaving the history of cocoa.
Preparando mole negro con pollo México D.F.
Preparando mole negro con pollo MĂŠxico D.F.
One jump further South. Costa Rica, a country that occupies the 0.01% of the Earth’s surface and which houses 4% of its fauna, as its slogan says “Pura Vida”. Our destination is the CATIE (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza) in Turrialba. Eduardo Somarriba, specialist in agroforestry systems and leader in the agroforestery program and sustainable culture in the CATIE, welcomes us in his office but he chooses for the interview a lake just right there, filled with fauna and wild life. Somehow, he reminds us of some character of John le Carré, in a novel set in the tropics: his clothes, his white Panama hat, his clever face… One of the first words he says is Theobroma Cocoa. He talks as if he had experienced the Ice Age, the ancient riverbeds of the Amazonian rivers, the tribes who lived there and the close relationship between them both and cocoa. The Peruvian Amazon. The place where it all began. After talking about the origins, we continue with the handling of the trees in the farms and from there we talk about the trees which give shade. He considers himself a lover of those trees. From his words we can create a complete manual for the good culture of cocoa. For him, cocoa is the most beneficial existing crop for the environment. Wilbert Philips is the manager of the program of genetic improvement of cocoa in the CATIE. Under his umbrella, we go through the world second largest cocoa collection. Since the 1940s, the CATIE preserves in perpetuity cocoa germplasm in its collection, a significant representation of the wide genetic variety of this species. In addition to the preservation, the fundamental objective of the collection is to provide with botanical material any university study and use it also as propagation material for genetic improvement programs. We find here the present and the future of cocoa, a world heritage difficult to sustain. Wilbert and his team are its guardians. Monilia sees us arrive at the plantation and jumps joyfully on our legs, a much appropriated name for a female dog in this
place... Wilbert brings us up-to-date on the genetic of cocoa, the importance to know which tree to plant in order to get a good crop, as its seed is fleshy if you keep it, it dies. Cocoa can only be stored as a plant; that’s why these places are so important for the preservation and the study of the tree. We discover the tenderness of the hand pollination and care at the time of grafting. Everything seems to be very precisely controlled, future fathers and mothers of the disease-resistant cocoa are being born, grown and produced here, on this piece of land... It’s fascinating to walk around them. A trip around the tropics and cocoa, all concentrated within a few hectares Wilbert, Adriana and Allan fight since years against pests. All their knowledge is put in its eradication. A fungus, the horror for the farmers. Moniliophthora roreri is a Basidiomycete fungus that causes moniliasis, one of the most serious problems for cocoa and its production in Latin America. This disease, the witches’ broom disease and the Phytophthora disease constitute the cocoa disease trilogy. During dinner, we talk about the only creature able to spread a plague around the world in just a few hours: human being and the global world. Wilbert advises us that if we are going to travel soon to Africa we should clean thoroughly our boots to prevent spreading this plague. The least we can say is that we feel impressed… We go out at night to photograph a few armadillos that don’t show up.
Sample of the genetic diversity of Theobroma at the entrance to the CATIE plantation.
Artificial pollination.
Cocoa sick of moniliasis.
Madagascar. The island. Imagine the best beach you can dream of, add 10% palm trees, paint its sand with white and its water with blue, set three women walking along the shore wearing coloured clothes and with a large basket full of small bananas and coconuts on their heads, sailing on the sea a small boat with its extended sail made of patchwork and a men rowing, ink in black the skin of all of them and there you’ll find us. The Malagasy don’t take care of nature, they belong to it. The daily routine without this narrow relation can’t be understood. Their protecting creams are clay from the mountain, their bath and their washing machine is the river. All their life is bio and recycled. We Europeans with our customs and tools look at them with some envy and amazement. How would it be to be 55 years old and never had had a hot shower? Do they think about it? we doubt it.. Cocoa and the impossible roads. Ambanja is a city of about 32,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Sambirano River, the plantations of vanilla, ylang ylang, pepper and cocoa abound. The large cultivated areas of Malagasy cocoa can be found here, and here we came to look for it. We arrived here in the morning by sea from the island of Nosy Be, on board of a small crammed boat, stopping along the way in the middle of the sea to pick up people who are waiting on board of a wooden canoe. Is it by chance that the canoe and the boat meet in order to take more people on board? I don’t think so, nothing seems left to chance here. The first encounters and administrative procedures in order to look for cocoa and its cultivators start early and we settle the first visit for the next day, with a four-wheel car towards the interior of this land. Jack, cocoa technician and now retired, will come along with us to translate and guide us. A quiet man
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with dark skin. There are 50 km from Ambanja until the plantation that we’re going to visit. It took us 4 hours to travel by car. Never, even in our drawings or more abstract dreams could we imagine that such a road existed and even less that it can be called a road, it’s impossible to describe. Brown colour, constant dust, potholes of half a meter deep, the driver had to stop to think if driving above the pothole and risking to fall inside or going inside the bump and then earth furrow would reach the car window. Our companions, vigorously shacked from side-to-side are impassive, accustomed, without complaint or questions or thirst or hunger. Their bodies move to the rhythm of the bumps, difficult for us, stiffness returns again and again to our European muscles. We arrive and the place explains it all, a 72 year old farmer with his 12 children and his 4 hectares of cocoa welcomes us. We follow him through the lower plants in the shade of the banana plantations and through the highest ones in the shadow of timber trees. You only hear the rustling of leaves and the knuckles of the man hitting the fruit of the cocoa to know if it’s ripe. In his house, 6 fermentation boxes in a cascade arrangement and banana leaf to cover them. Sitting in the shade, without haste but with a continuous activity, he speaks of cocoa, of work, of harvest, he says that on these lands cocoa has no diseases and that a river floods the plantation in the rainy season and brings the necessary manure and minerals. Here everything is bio, the plantation, the man, his family and his entire life. They kill two chickens and we eat with them. We talk about Costa Rica and the moniliasis disease, he looks at us absorbed, he wants to know more about this disease that hasn’t come to Africa. Here, he says, the only cocoa pest are thieves.
Children playing on the beach, Nosy Be, Madagascar.
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Child playing on the beach, Nosy Be, Madagascar. 62
Women sewing clothes on the beach. 63
By canoe arriving at the Lokobe Natural Park.
Stop on the road to see the baobabs.
Freshly harvested cocoa basket with flip-flops from Barcelona FC.
With a touch of the fingers the farmer checks if the cocoa is ripe.
Walking through the streets.
Crossing the Sambirano river.
Children resting. Woman with a basket of cocoa freshly picked on her head, Diana region.
Destination Cocoa Edition II. The party.
Port of departure.
Destination Cocoa Edition II “Calorie Art et Culture d´Ambanja à Observer” “Mamboly Kakao Miady Amin´ny Fiakaran´ny Hafanana”, printed on a small white paper, the program schedule and a stamp with the map of Madagascar. Our official invitation to the feast of Cocoa. The main street of Ambanja usually full of bikes and people is today crowded with children and teenagers dancing to the frenetic pace of their bodies. Cocoa farmers coming from the inland move not stop, they sing and dance, the music comes out of their mouths and their bare feet. The entire city follows and applauds them. Ambanja is celebrating. Cocoa is present in all this: cocktail of cocoa, prints of the fruit on the fabrics they wear, speeches of thanks to the fruit and more than 20 girls wanting to be Miss Cocoa this year. Today is the feast of the Malagasy cocoa. We try to go unnoticed in the middle of the ruckus. It never happens. Everything betrays us. Whether we like it or not, we are two “vasaha”, two foreigners, two whites, where you don’ t find any.
Ambanja is linked to Diego Suarez by the main road of Madagascar, they advise us to go with a four-wheel car again and we follow their advice, we have learned the lesson, if in Africa they say that the road is bad you must take good notice, in their life the word “bad” is not frequently used. Diego Suarez has one of the main ports of departure to Europe. The cocoa cultivated in the Valley of Sambirano travels to our homes from here. Michel Eric Ratsimba helps us with the paperwork and bureaucracy to enter in the harbour area. Two phosphorescent jackets, two typewritten sheets, two official stamps and we enter. The merchandise is loaded on the boats. Workers don’t stop, busy between containers, boxes and some games of dominoes. The ship that will sail to Rotterdam during three months is bound to set sail soon. Seeing it there moored in the port, makes you want to jump and slowly travel towards Europe. It will be on another occasion, the stories of cocoa are waiting for us here. The port gives off a smell of cocoa, pepper, ylang ylang and sea.
Cocoa farmers decorate their legs with seeds before starting the dance and the party.
Main avenue in Ambanja.
Women wear fabrics decorated with cocoa fruit.
Coca-Cola and baobabs graffiti on the street, Diego Suarez.
Graffiti on the street, Diego Suarez.
Fruit, vegetables, meat and fish market in Diego Suarez.
A girl walks on a Sunday the streets of Diego Suarez.
Sunday in the city. A Sunday in August. In Barcelona, people will be scattered along the beaches of Barceloneta, Sitges... in Diego Suarez the beach to spend a Sunday is called Ramena. It seems that the entire city is there. We remain in the empty city, to stroll through its streets, photograph it and film it. There is no one. The sun and the constructions of a bygone colonial era give it the aspect of a scale model. We photograph with hard shadows and contrasting light. It seems to be put there for us and lighted by us. We wouldn’t change anything to the wide space in which we walk for hours. To Ramena we’ll go tomorrow Monday, when everyone will be in the city. We seek solitude during two days. Entença 33, 5º, 1ª. Barcelona. We wake up somewhat stunned. We should not experience jet lag. The time difference with Madagascar is only one hour. But something is in the body, we feel between dream and sleeplessness, between memories and absences, between the desire to return home and to start again. We try to return to a routine that never existed, well yes, at home orange juice, toasts with tomato and olive oil and white coffee, on trips, breakfast in thousand places, depending on the country, the house in which we sleep, the climate, deficiencies and excesses of the places. 20 days in Barcelona to wash, sort, edit, and organize new destinations. Next stop Indonesia.
Self-portrait with dog, Diego Suarez.
Almost at the antipodes.
Guided by Dewi.
The expression “nature morte” comes from the confused translation in French and Spanish (naturaleza muerta) of the original Flemish expression “stilleven”, which really should be translated as “life in peace”, “quiet life” or “motionless life”, the meaning has been respected in the German expression “Stillleben” and in English “Still Life”.
Our first meeting with Indonesian cocoa should have taken place easily. Everything had been planned beforehand in order to meet Tiara Setiade, big producer of Indonesian cocoa and his plantations. But it did not. An e-mail informs us that the interview has been cancelled, the main reason of our trip to this island. No plan, no project…we let our own steps guide us across the city…we talk about how to improvise... we sit down on the terraces…we walk across squares without paying attention to the imposing monuments... ours brains, helped by our good notes concerning Indonesian cocoa, don’t stop working. In our notebook one address, one name and one e-mail sent from Barcelona: Dewi Sumartini. Thamrin City Cosmo Mansion 11 – CC Jl. Kebon Kacang Raya Jakarta 10340. There we go. A building, a mixture of a vertical shopping mall and an office centre, overlooks the avenue. The last door of our last elevator leads us to some kind of policeman/doorman who stops us in our tracks... explanations, pleas and waits. We enter. Dewi is a young woman, thin, wrapped in her mauve coloured hijab, she greets us with a big smile and while thanking us for our visit she apologises for not speaking English. We will have to cope with the sign-language and our Indonesian dictionary. A mug of hot chocolate, a sheet of paper, a pen and a short explanation of our project, a map of the island, some names and a place where we must go come what may: the ICCRI in Jember, in the east of Java, where we’ll find the best scientists of Indonesia working with and for cocoa. One phone call and an appointment is arranged. On the next day we take a plane and fly to Jember via Surabaya.
Seating in a waiting room in Qatar airport, surrounded by shops, restaurants and an infinite number of objects decorating this place, brings to our minds images of still-lifes we saw not many days ago at a painting exhibition in Barcelona. Fruits, food, plants, rocks, shells, kitchen, table and house tools, antiquities, books, jewels, coins, pipes, etc. Nowhere did we see paintings of cocoa. Do they exist? I will keep on investigating. Our journey through Asian lands has already started. In a few hours we will be discovering Indonesian cocoa and meeting the scientists and farmers who take care of it. Jakarta is the capital city and the most populated town of Indonesia. Including the Metropolitan area, there are 18 millions of people living in here. By the concentration of population in here, it could remind us of Mexico City, but that’s not the case. We are in another part of the word. Another climate, another religion, different faces, clothes, everything is different. We get out of the airport and we know that we will need many kilometres to find cocoa on these lands. Jakarta has no smell of cocoa or fertile land. After a few hours of sleep we are completely introduced into our new time frame for the next coming weeks, we go out on the street to sweat and find somewhere to have a bite to eat…it’s easy; the city is full of food stands: the sidewalks are invaded by small ovens, ice buckets with alive fishes inside. If you analyse it thoroughly it seems that pedestrians don’t have their own space to walk, the lower floors of the buildings are packed with shops and in front of them some others appear and invade everything. It seems that in Jakarta everything is allowed. It seems everything has already been invented and that the anarchic operating mode of the city is an organised chaos. An octopus inside a bucket next to a butane gas bottle in full sun will be our meal…delicious.
Yakarta, downtown area.
Jakarta on a Sunday afternoon.
Various fruits in formaldehyde.
The three scientists. A huge cocoa bean with the name of the place in black letters Pusat Penelitian Kopi dan Kakao Indonesia, INDONESIAN COFFEE AND COCOA RESEARCH INSTITUTE, presides over the entrance of the centre. Cahya Ismayadi opens the door of the ICCRI while offering us a piece of chocolate, in bar. We can see from the very beginning that Indonesian customs did not inherit from their ancestors the gastronomy of cocoa as Mexicans did. We talk about our project. The conversation evokes past trips, experiences lived over those months. He is happy listening to us, he enjoys what he hears. Tracking cocoa around the world seems to him an interesting task. He is interested in our anecdotes and above all in the conversations we shared with other scientists. We schedule interviews and visits for two days in Jember. As we talk with him, we hear the Imam call to prayer. Cahya disappears and joins the rest of the Muslims who work in the centre, here they are the majority. Soetanto Abdoellah. Expert in soil science and plants nutrition. John Bako Baon. Expert in earth nutrition, crops assessment, soil and plant fertility. Ismayadi. Expert in fermentation and in the complete post harvest process. All three are slim with brown skins, their clothes tell about their job, cotton cloth with cocoa illustrations and infinity of colours on them. It looks good on them, it gives them a cheerful aspect, rather distant from the one we have of scientists in Europe. A large cocoa plantation dedicated to the study of the fruit will be the setting of our interviews. We follow them very closely while they speak amongst themselves, we see trees dedicated to providing shade, seedlings, healthy cocoa trees and some others sick... They walk slowly through the plantation, making stopovers to explain stories, investigations, arguments they want us to film with our cameras, and between all this they give a tree a special relevance, the inga dulcis, used as shade tree for cocoa. For the way in which they start talking about it, for the way they wait for us to place correctly the tripod and leave us time to focus, we know that this tree is hiding something. Soetanto explains that no seeds fall from the tree, it doesn’t spread by itself but rather it needs to be planted in the place you wish to get shade. A shade that is controlled by the farmer. Quite a
finding. It only grows where you plant it and for this reason it only gives shade where you decided to have it. It also serves as food for the sheep which are part of the parallel incomes of the farmers. A kind of hut hosts them. It seems that here nothing is destroyed or thrown away: the trees give fruits, others give shade to the first ones and food to animals which will end up feeding someone. We seat down in a place which remind us of the picnic areas that splatter the secondary roads in Spain. We talk at length with them. The talks are filled with numbers, 1 point 2, 1 point 7… they represent tons of cocoa per hectare of plantation. We touch on issues we had never talked before: the non-fermentation of cocoa, the artificial drying in big ovens because of the rain in Indonesia… we also talk about their dreams: Indonesia could become the first cocoa producer in 2020, to continue working for the benefit of this plant throughout their lives, make the farmers learn well how to grow this plant... those are dreams with scientific basis. They look happy while working hand in hand with this tree they love and somehow admire. They encourage growing cocoa in Indonesia. All three agree: it has a bright future ahead. We go back to the centre and a meal is waiting for us there. Fruits, rice, chicken, a wide variety of food served on a table self-service style. Soetanto looks hungry. Some kind of brown little pack draws our attention, “tapei” Cahya says, fermented manioc, very popular around here.
Football field on the way to Jember.
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The sheep eat leaves cocoa after pruning.
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Cahya Ismayadi, John Bako Baon y Soetanto Abdoellah, scientists of the ICCRI, in the plantation of the research center.
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Second day in Jember. We quickly forget the numbers of hectares of a plantation. We could not tell the exact extension of this one. Very, very much. They knew we were coming to visit them, Cayha accompanies us. A vast extension of land full of cocoa plants, a kind of industrial plant with 5 big ovens working to dry cocoa, a warehouse with firewood to make the ovens work, a plant with 4 levels stepped fermentation boxes covered with bags, rails to move small wagons full of cocoa ready to be fermented. People moving the cocoa in the driers, transporting it in small wagons, unloading it in the stepped boxes, making cuts in the beans to check their ripeness, trucks full of cocoa… Rudyard Kipling once wrote: “the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it”. We are impregnated with the smell of smoke as we interview Ferdiansyah Wahyo in front of the oven. The supervisor of this place speaks Indonesian and we see, once again, a man who is proud to work in cocoa. We hear the word “bangga”, pride, “pepujan”, idol. We keep this last one, the way he defines cocoa: “cocoa is my idol”. The interview with Cahya takes place in the fermentation plant, the smell of acetic acid fills the space, it reaches our throats and doesn’t leave us until several hours after having left. Cahya explains about the importance of this process for future aromas, “The first key to develop a good aroma is found here, inside these boxes”. Two strokes with his hands indicate the box on which he seats while he’s talking with us. Origin, post-harvest process, words that can’t be understood separately when you talk about cocoa. Each definition mingles with the other, one appears in the definition of the other. A labyrinthine language is created and ends up defining cocoa. Before our eyes we can see tons of cocoa going by, in the different moments of its process. The day starts, continues and will end hot. We choose the see
to finish the day and see a bit more of this land. There’s almost no sand. Black mounds scattered throughout the beach show us its volcanic origin. Men are fishing, women talking and eating a snack, the colourful boats are anchored. Everyone who is spending the day on the beach is taking selfies. Everyone visits the beach with its arm extension or selfie stick in order to remain immortalize with the sea and the volcanic stones in the background. If the places were only known by the pictures of the people who visit them, we could think that nothing exists by itself, neither the volcanic rock, nor the sea. Without a person or several ones smiling and covering all up. We take our Leica and we photograph the people taking photos of themselves. It’s crazy. The fresh coconut juice and the darkness bring us back to the real world. We can see nothing and that’s when the landscape seems real. The smell of the sea, humidity and saltpetre returns its condition to the landscape. We end up the day happy, eating fish under an awning.
Rocky beach, east of the island of Java.
Oven drying cocoa.
Freshly cut cocoa beans to check the fermentation point.
Bandung factory.
The unexpected outcomes of those trips.
Bandung, about 4 hours drive from Jakarta, hosts one of the factories of Barry-Callebaut on the island. Once again a woman wrapped in a hijab opens the doors of cocoa in Indonesia. Ani Setiyoningrum makes herself available for us to show the factory. People here move easily, with poise, the shoes, the gowns, the hats, the plastic glasses, don’t seem to disturb them at all. We move slowly between them and the machineries, we look up towards the large silos, loitering all around, learning about the transformation process of cocoa. They talk quickly, with the normalcy of their work. It’s not our first time, but it doesn’t matter, the transformation process still leaves us stunned, the alchemy that surrounds all this, the change of cocoa into different elements extracted from it, the transformation process. We have seen it so many times on the tree that it still surprises us. Cocoa into chocolate. Worm into butterfly. The shears falls with a dry thud and allows the inside of cocoa to be seen, the colour after drying shows a range of pantone colours between browns, violets and blacks...talking about colour and astringency our journey through the factory ends. Evening falls. The sun goes down, the hit gives us a break, but not the humidity. We keep on sweating.
Jakarta at night is still strange. With almost no light on the streets, it awakes our sense of survival dead long ago in Europe. The feet avoid the holes and the head the bars of the street stalls which stick out from everywhere. We look for the ice bucket with fish that will be our dinner today. The computer gets a brown colour, a patina of dirt covers it again, this time with a small stone we don’t manage to remove, embedded in the corner of the letter R. The screen has the appearance of a parchment under that cover, it has lost its cold and bluish colour that use to characterize it. When we didn’t expect any other contingencies, we receive an e-mail confirming that the interview fixed from Barcelona with Tiara Setiade in Java will definitely take place. We look at each other and more than happy we answer that as they propose, we will be on the next day at 4 o’clock in the morning waiting in our hotel to visit the plantation on the west side of Java. There’s no need to take the plane. On this occasion the journey will be by car.
Discharging dry cocoa bags.
Self-portrait in the factory.
Workers of the factory.
Tiara Setiade. At first glance, you would describe him as a small man, with power since he gets into his own car but doesn’t drive it. He has a chauffeur. After 10 days coexisting with Indonesian people, we can see that it’s very normal around here when things are fine for you. Like in many big cities in developing countries, Jakarta suffers from important traffic problems. Due to the government incapacity to offer adequate transportation to the magnitude of the city, the town suffers from serious traffic saturation problems each day. It’s very common to spend three hours to enter the city and three hours to get out of it daily. Therefore, when you can afford it, you have a chauffeur who works during those hours while you spend your time sleeping, organizing e-mails or reading on the back seat. We travel during 5 hours to reach the plantations, his home, his hacienda. There the people who protect him welcome us, men in uniform, private policemen who look after him and his lands. We a simple look we begin to understand who Tiara Setiadi is. His cocoa plantations supports 10.000 families in the area. Not 10.000 people, 10.000 families! The place is pleasant: trees and green everywhere. He decides that the best is to visit first the post-harvest plant, after that the plantation and leave the interview for after lunch. We follow him very closely, between him and us two henchmen follow him everywhere. A simple look from him and they get closer. The fermentation plant in shape of stepped pyramid with at least 500 boxes fermenting at the same time, can not leave you indifferent. It’s spectacular. As far as we can see, men are dealing with the fermentation process and women are in charge of the drying plant, covered with clothes form head to toe. Cocoa dries in the sun, women move it or thin it, as we have seen other times; but all here is multiplied by 1.000. On a massive scale, everything here is on massive scale. We want to film all, to photograph all, hands and feet cannot keep up with all. We try to calm down and organize efficiently the shooting. We could stay 10 days there and still feel we haven’t finished the work. There are so many things happening around cocoa, so many people we could photograph patiently, looking for the light, the background... it’s impossible, we would need to settle there. Pak Tiara is smiling, he sees us in such a good spirit with all he has created, that we presume it gives him a certain pride. We tour around the plantation on board of a pick-up, escorted
by two motorcyclists who don’t take their eyes off us. Stops to film the harvest, the opening of the fruit, the opening of the soil to create compost. Compost in Indonesia, compost in Madagascar, compost in Peru and México... the soil and its nutrients are essential for a good culture. In the middle of the afternoon, this image of power given by Pak Tiara while we were visiting his lands, disappears gradually and gives us the opportunity to see a man, peaceful, quiet and somewhat Zen. The breeze gives us a break. The place we choose for the interview oozes calm. A small terrace, surrounded with green, away from the hustle of the plantation. He chooses the place, he likes this wicker chair in which he seats and the views he has in front of him. Above us a huge wasps´ nest keeps up with its bustle. The little buzz is also relaxing. A perfect atmosphere has been created, it seems that peace and quietness reign around this man. Talking with him we find a man very much centred not only on the recovery of the trees using engineering as he says, but also on the recovery of the soil. He is strongly opposed to the farmers who push the trees with fertilizers and pesticides in order to obtain a higher yield. This makes them unsustainable in the long term. His attention is centred on the soil. The word soil comes out of his mouth again and again, key element in the life of the plant, such as water is for the fish. He speaks slowly, with no hurry to end the conversation. He makes long pauses between his remarks, he thinks carefully each comment, he considers well each answer. He gulps saliva and starts talking again to sentence: “we must start cultivating cocoa again like in the jungle, only then cocoa culture will become sustainable again”. We take a stroll and he shows us the worm farm of which he talked to us, a gigantic plant dedicated entirely to his culture. It’s good for the soil and for the tree. We leave him in the middle of the afternoon, at around 6pm… we could have stretched the day indefinitely, but we have to go. A five-hour journey awaits us to reach Jakarta again.
Women in the drying area.
Portrait of Tiara Setiade.
Worker cleaning the cocoa beans.
Collecting cocoa, Tiara Setiade plantation, Java.
On the road east of Java.
Pham Hong Duc Phuoc, cocoa guru. Vietnam. We land at noon, after a long trip from Jakarta via Kuala Lumpur. Ho Chi Minh City is one of the biggest cities in Southeast Asia. Almost nothing reminds us of Jakarta. At first glance the city seems free, younger, fresher and open, less suffocating. Even if the heat and the humidity are still setting the pace. Today, we’ll spend the afternoon relaxing, washing clothes and visiting the district. Our hotel is located in the district 1 of the city, “right in the business, shopping and leisure centre”, as stated in the publicity. We are not much interested in business and shopping however we go out to discover it. From the very beginning of our walk we see that the district 1 encloses much more than only shops. In the evening, in front of a bowl of rice, shrimps and vegetables, we recall the words of Cinzia Anselmi in Switzerland, “if you go to Asia you must interview Phuoc, the guru of cocoa in Vietnam”: Pham Hong Duc Phuoc receives us in the University of Ho Chi Minh City, The Nong Lam University (NLU). The theme of our interview will revolve around BioCharcoal, produced from organic wastes in the plantations. His explanations together with pictures on his computer and even coal on the table, open up the conversation. The problem of the farmers in Vietnam is not different from the one in other countries. The excessive use of chemical products in the cultivation are the reason why the soil loses its properties and even the definition of the word in agriculture : “ensemble of organic and inorganic material found on the surface of the earth, capable of sustaining vegetal life”, becomes meaningless. The soil fed chemically can even turn into cement and will never be useful again. Who would use cement as basis for cultivation? Without doubt, he wants to make us understand that biocharcoal is the solution not only as fertilizer for the plants but also as a basis for the soil to improve its power of absorption of humidity and nutrients and also as a reducer of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We spend three hours with him: strolling around the cocoa plantation which belongs to the university, we talk about the small Vietnamese farmers completely dedicated to growing this fruit. Vietnam, a country which recently launched the cultivation of this fruit. We leave the place once again with a good taste in the mouth. A new link in whole chain, another solution to another problem. Talking about the flattering future of the soil, only using a simple thing such as biocharcoal leaves you at least serene... the city absorb us again…tomorrow back to Europe for a few days…Cameroun awaits us.
Pham Hong Duc Phuoc in the cocoa plantation of the University of Ho Chi Minh.
Arriving to Africa. And when you think you have seen it all after six months travelling, you arrive in Cameroun, and it’s as if you had seen nothing. As if you were born again and you had to learn everything again: speak, drink, walk with no light on the streets, wash yourself without water, understand... in this part of the world it seems impossible to use your senses separately. It seems you cannot taste without smelling, touch without looking, everything overflows, everything is mixed up, while you eat you smell, while you listen you look with interest not loosing sight of all that’s happening. The first time you enter a village in sub-Saharan Africa you’re filled with thousands of things that are happening... nothing is as you knew and much less as you were told.
Everything amazes us. The landscape with huge baobabs gi ving shade to the cocoa plants grown in the thickest jungle leaves us petrified and speechless. It’s impossible to film what we see. The plantations are mixed with the jungle and the animals. The most fertile soil we might ever see is here and has a reddish colour mixed with black stones from the volcano Cameroon. The farmer and his workers open the thick bushes with machete blows, and we follow them until the reach a bushy place full of trees with flashy yellow cocoa coming out from the trunk.
Accompanied by Jean-Didier we enter into the plantations of Cameroonian cocoa. We arrive exactly in the month when cocoa harvest is at its highest peak. Everything is cocoa, in the villages you can smell acetic acid and cocoa drying in the sun. The few paved highways become narrow paths. A large proportion of asphalt becomes dryers of cocoa. It seems that all this cocoa doesn’t fit in the villages or in the small towns we drive through, it overflows and comes out forming rivers on the roads. There’s a continuous hustle. If a man is not harvesting it’s because he’s controlling the fermentation and the movements in the dryers, or the transportation to the warehouse. The bars are full because, as they explain, the farmers just got paid for their crops. In a few months this same bars will be empty. Carpe Diem as we haven’t seen it before.
The cocoa farmer shows us fresh cocoa.
Cocoa tree full of fruit.
Cocoa farmer harvesting the fruit.
Portrait with Kumba children.
Workers in a cocoa store carrying 50 kg bags.
Filming in the streets of a village in Cameroon.
Self-portrait on the local bus on the way to Kumba.
The people of the lake. Kumba is located in southeast of Cameroun, also known as the city of K. It has got an estimated population of 400.000 inhabitants and is a trade centre for cocoa and oil palms. 7km from Kumba we find Barombi Lake. We arrive there after a long walk across a mountain covered with abundant vegetation. Along the way, we come across people going or returning always faster than us, always with a more comfortable walk in the mud or dry earth. After one week around these lands, we learn that it’s easy to walk either on dry earth or on mud; things become complicated when both get mixed and create impossible paths. The dry earth sticks to the mud and the boots start weighting more and more. It does not seem to disturb the ramblers of the lake Barombi, they walk bare-foot or with flip-flops. The lake is an exuberant stage, a huge extension of water surrounded by vegetation. Therefore, at a glance, it’s impossible to know what is hidden on the shore opposite to us. Here, on our side, a group of men are loading bags of cocoa on a pick-up truck. Women are cleaning fishes with babies sleeping and stuck on their backs, and the wooden canoes arrive loaded with bags of cocoa from the other shore. After negotiating one hour with them, some CFA francs, some photos reluctantly taken and the promise to pay some beers in the village, conclude the agreement to take us to the other part of the lake and meet the tribe who grows cocoa there. The wooden canoe has enough space to transport 4 people. We are six and our filming equipment and the tripod. Nobody moves, nobody can swim.
We are welcome. We take as a reference the smoke coming out of the vegetation thinking it’s an oven to dry cocoa, that’s our compass and there we go. They talk a lot, every body wants to explain something: they are cocoa farmers since nobody knows when, since always they say… the rainy climate of the area forces them to use ovens to dry cocoa. Almost always, the big problem for the farmers is to transport the cocoa from the plantation to the warehouse city in order to sell it. Here it travels in paddle canoe and is then carried to Kumba on a pick-up truck. Once again, the day falls short and we end up paying more than one beer to every one who joins in. “One beer” becomes 15 or 20 beers in the village and 20 or 30 more in the city of Kumba.
The village seems to be organized because of and for cocoa: a blind man who is around 80 and 102 years old, surrounded by 15 kids, greets us as the village chief. He talks incessantly and between his words the only one we understand is “cocoa”.
Farmers coming home.
Barombi lake.
Drying cocoa in ovens. Lake Barombi.
Self-portrait with the head of the town. Lake Barombi.
Impossible roads. Every day, we live is a new adventure to reach the plantations. Eyabu Eylangwe, president of the cooperative Konaf in the city of Koney welcomes us in his office: a place filled with notes, papers, photos of groups and people, plenty of people. A meeting with farmers from the district and our visit explain the crowd. The greatest problem for them is to take out the cocoa from the area using the bad roads. We explain him that for us the definition of road according to our dictionary is “ public way, wide and spacious, paved and arranged to ensure the transit of vehicles“, he laughs, in his dictionary it has never been like that, that way we talk about has never existed.
We understand what Eyabu means with bad roads. We have just experienced it in order to reach him. On his land all the efforts are focused in getting the cocoa to the central warehouse to be sold. A hard task. We see people carrying on their heads bags of 40kg while it’s fermenting. It seems that their firm and fibrous bodies always were like that, it seems they never were kids…some others cross bridges made with lianas over rivers to take the cocoa to the other shore.
Arriving here has been a real odyssey, hours and hours on roads covered with mud. We come across motorbikes carrying 5 people and one bag or even more… trucks which look like three-storey buildings moving around. The displacements of people and goods around here are never in vain. We see trucks jammed for hours on the road, surrounded by people selling water and food. Every cloud has a silver lining... The number of food-stands next to a jammed vehicle is proportional to the time it has been stopped and the number of people it carries. We are fascinated by their adaptive capacity, patience and organization in this type of setbacks. And also us, stuck in the traffic, with mud up to the ears, we shake the car in an attempt to get out of there.
Impossible roads.
Impossible roads.
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Cocoa farmers use the “Monkey Bridge� to take the cocoa from the plantation to the central warehouse.
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A script matured during the trip. And so here we continue delighted with Cameroun, a country which verges on every extreme, and we try to verge upon them all as well. A story follows another and a person enables us to meet the next. Nothing in this type of trips seems to forecast what will happen later on. The script prepared beforehand keeps on changing and expanding almost every day, and so, because of those changes of script, the project matures and acquires its shape. I red somewhere that “there’s nothing worse than knowing a lot about the place you travel to, because the tediousness of being in a place you know in advance, makes the trip boring and little exiting”. Nothing could be further from the truth for us. Guided by the people who personally lived the story we are telling, our travel guide is gradually being written, our logbook. The images we are filming are more real than we could ever have imagined, no artifice, no one interviewed pretending to be someone he/she’s not. We try not to forget the rigour of data, places and dates, although if at this stage of the trip, what happened to us two days ago could well have happened two months ago or two hours ago. The function of time lost long ago its sense.
Once in Barcelona, looking at the images of our last interview we feel a deep restlessness. We remember our red eyes due to the smoke of the oven drying cocoa, Nango Yousef eyes, white, immutable. All the smells, sounds, laughs that we won’t probably ever live again, have turned into terabytes of data stored in our hard drives. Our study has another aspect after such an intense adventure. Cocoa leaves hooked with pushpins on a map of the world, a 55cm long machete to cut the fruit in cross direction, a hat from a farmer, an ornament made from seeds and that farmers in Madagascar knotted around their ankles to create music, a toy from Cameroun… Our life, as the life of hundreds of people we met, will be linked forever with cocoa. Now it’s time to show you all we have seen and lived and may be, you will, somehow, become part of this adventure.
It’s difficult to explain how important it is for us to conclude this part of the project in an African country. That the last interview has been made to a farmer, in a village inside a lake, has an inexcusable importance for us. Beginning the project in the Peruvian Amazon where the cocoa was born and ending it here is like closing the cycle. We travelled parallel to the history of this fruit. To its trip around the World.
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Dry cocoa.
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Los ojos que no ven es un proyecto fotográfico realizado en Etiopía durante el año 2011.
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