Bolivia

Bolivia is a small cacao producer but a distinctive one, known both for organised organic cultivation and for genuinely wild-harvested Amazonian cacao. National output is modest, yet a large share is certified organic and the country has a long cooperative tradition.

Cultivated production centres on Alto Beni, in the Amazon foothills of La Paz Department, where smallholders and cooperatives grow cacao in agroforestry plots. This is the home of El Ceibo, a federation of cooperatives founded in 1977 that was among the first certified-organic cocoa cooperatives in the world and processes through to finished products. Native criollo and nativo types were partly displaced by higher-yielding hybrids introduced from the 1960s.

The Beni Department lowlands hold naturally occurring stands of wild and semi-wild cacao — known locally as Beniano or cacao silvestre — harvested by communities from seasonally flooded forest islands called 'chocolatales', notably around Baures near the Iténez reserve. Genetic studies associate this Beniano material with a distinct cacao population of the Beni River that is not represented in international genebanks and is not one of the named Motamayor et al. (2008) clusters, making it of particular interest as a genetic resource.