Listening skill
Today I
listen VOA special English Agriculture report about Cacao or cocoa trees grown
in hot, rainy areas of Africa, Asia and Central and South America. Their beans
are used to make cocoa powder, cocoa butter and of course chocolate. There are
five to six million growers, maybe more. Many are poor family farmers with only
a few hectares.
The
trees produce the most pods when they are ten, but they are still productive long.
The workers use large knives to cut the lower pods and long tools to remove
pods from high on the tree. A half gram of chocolate requires about four
hundred beans. The world cocoa foundation says an average pod contains twenty
to fifty beans and growers may lose perhaps one-third of their harvest to
diseases and insects. But now scientists have genetic maps of two kinds of
cocoa trees.
The
average West African cocoa farmer produces about four hundred kilos of beans
per hectare. But Howard-Yana Shapiro, head of plant science and external
research at Mars, thinks that science could greatly increase the yield.
.
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