ALLIANCE OUT TO SAVE CHOCOLATE.

Byline: Carol Kaesuk Yoon The New York Times

An unusual alliance of manufacturers and environmental groups has formed to try to prevent what for many people around the world would be a disaster of gigantic proportions: a shortage of chocolate.

For while the world's appetite for chocolate grows more voracious each year, cocoa farms around the globe are failing, under siege from fungal and viral diseases and insects.

For decades, cocoa farming has escaped such problems by moving to new areas in the tropics, even new countries or continents, where growers find more rain forest to establish cocoa farms.

But now they are running out of new forests to turn to. Researchers predict a shortfall in beans from the cacao tree, the raw material from which chocolate is made, in as little as five to 10 years.

``We're running out of places in the world'' to plant cocoa, said Carol Knight, vice president of scientific affairs at the American Cocoa Research Institute, a nonprofit group that tracks cocoa bean supply. ``We have to figure out how to grow it sustainably. Nobody wants to lose chocolate.''

To that end, representatives from the Mars, Cadbury, Nestle and Hershey chocolate companies met with conservation groups last month at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama to talk about strategies for sustainable farming. The Mars company paid for the meeting.

Sustainability is a broad notion that includes keeping farms partially forested to preserve biodiversity; farming without large doses of pesticides, fungicides or fertilizers; and replanting rather than abandoning farms.

For cocoa, researchers say, sustainability will require a shift away from the large plantations carved out of the rain forest to the smaller farms where cacao trees are grown in the shade of larger trees. Plantation trees, exposed to the sun, require more fertilizer, fungicide and pesticide, and are at greater risk of the spread of pests and disease. Plantations fail when the cost of maintaining them becomes prohibitive.

A shift away from plantations could prove a boon to small farmers and also help preserve rain forests and the many plant and animal species that appear to flourish in the natural environment of a cocoa grove.

Daunting task

But the task of designing the small-scale cocoa farm of the future is daunting because little is known about how best to grow the trees.

The cacao tree evolved in the New World tropics under the shade of taller rain forest trees. After six years or so, the slow-growing tree produces fruit, large pods about the size and shape of a small football that contain about 40 cocoa beans, each the size of a lima bean. They can be roasted, ground and mixed with sugar and milk to produce chocolate.

But for reasons that researchers say they do not yet understand, the cacao tree seems particularly vulnerable to pests.

Walter Rodriguez, president of a cocoa-growing cooperative of small farmers in Costa Rica, speaking by telephone through an interpreter, said that in Costa Rica, the fungus monilia has been a devastating problem. ``In 1978, '79, when monilia came,'' he said, ``the trees remained but the harvest disappeared. As a product, cocoa almost disappeared.''

Tropical diseases

In West Africa, black pod disease, a cousin of potato blight, can cause losses of up to 80 percent of the crop in a wet year. Experts predict that in Bahia, an area of Brazil that has had annual productions of hundreds of thousands of tons of cocoa pods, harvests this year will be half what they were just a few years ago because of a fungal disease called witches'-broom.

``There are diseases in South America that are threatening to wipe out the industry there,'' said Dr. Jim Gockowski, an agricultural economist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, speaking by telephone from Cameroon, ``as well as the rest of the world if they spread.''

Once disease strikes, trees not only produce fewer beans but beans of less reliable quality and, some say, poorer flavor.

Plantation costs

In hopes of increasing production, some farmers, like those in Malaysia, have planted hundreds of acres of trees on cleared land, but the trees, bereft of shade from taller trees, appear to be far more vulnerable to diseases and pests.

Plantations produce large yields in the first few years, but the cost of maintaining the fields soon becomes prohibitive.

Marlene Machut, a spokeswoman for M&M/Mars, explained that on plantations, ``if there is a disease, it runs rampant across a much larger acreage than in a small-farm situation, where one farmer may have a problem but it doesn't leap to the next farm.''

Plantation farming is also inefficient, Lass said. ``You try to do the uniform thing to trees, like spraying on a schedule, and you end up costing yourself money. Not every tree needs that treatment.''

By contrast, said John Lunde, industrial scientist and director of international environmental programs at M&M/Mars, ``the small farmers with a couple of acres of land know each tree like a dairy farmer knows each cow's performance and what works when.''

As a result, there is an emerging consensus among chocolate makers and researchers that the future of cocoa beans lies with small farmers on more shaded, forested, intensively tended land.

For conservation advocates, this is all good news.

Dr. Russell Greenberg, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, said: ``Most of the areas where tropical migrant birds go for the winter are deforested. We're interested in crops that promote trees being out there.''

And researchers are finding that cocoa supports many species, not just birds.

``What's surprising is the amount of diversity that you do find,'' Dr. Alison Power said. Power and Dr. Alex Flecker, ecologists at Cornell University, have been working in the Dominican Republic, where cocoa is grown under the most natural conditions, in the shade of tall trees that remain from an original tropical forest. Cocoa also can be grown in the shade of trees that have been planted by the farmers themselves.