ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Wild Cacao and Broken Branches: Disease, science and cacao agriculture in 20th century Trinidad

• In Event: Manipulating Biota, Engineering Healthscapes: Colonial Science & Medicine 1750-2000

English Abstract

In May 1928, in Trinidad’s L’Ebranche Valley, reports surfaced of Theobroma cacao (cacao) trees with tattered leaves and twisted branches – the first signs of Witches’ Broom, a devastating fungus. Trinidad had supplied twenty percent of the world’s cacao in 1920, but two decades later, it produced less than one percent. Taking the Witches' Broom outbreak as a starting point, this paper examines how the island’s cacao plantations became contested healthscapes in the early twentieth century. Planters, colonial officers and agronomists confronted diseases, soil exhaustion, and complex trade and imperial politics such that plants, pathogens, laboring bodies, and scientific institutions became entangled in ways that demanded intervention.

This paper suggests that ecological crises transformed Trinidad into a key site for engineering cacao’s future. As Witches’ Broom spread, agronomists and botanists at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA) built the Cocoa Research Scheme (CRS), reframing the island’s diseased plantations as laboratories for remaking cacao’s biological and economic life. The ICTA mobilised geneticists, breeders, taxonomists, student observers, and some planters to search for, classify, and produce disease-resistant “wild” types. Trinidad’s struggling farms grounded global knowledge production, exporting pods, papers, and germplasm across the empire to support new cacao schemes in West Africa.

By framing Trinidad’s cacao plantations as healthscapes, I suggest that diseases exposed the fragility of these environments but also opened opportunities. Planters and agronomists drew on new and old technologies, and on local and foreign expertise to engineer these landscapes. These diseases revealed pluralistic visions of what a healthy cacao plantation should be and raised questions about the best ways to “cure” this land.

Author

• Mika Hyman, University of Cambridge