Brazil's biggest conilon coffee cooperative to launch cocoa pilot project in Bahia state

Reuters

4 days ago

SAO PAULO, July 24 (Reuters) - Brazil's biggest conilon coffee cooperative, Cooabriel, is launching a cocoa pilot project in the country's Bahia state slated for September in collaboration with commodities powerhouse Cargill, it said in an interview this week.
Cooabriel hopes the pilot, located in the south of Bahia, will produce around 10,000 60-kilogram bags of cocoa beans, working with farmers who are already producing conilon coffee, part of the same family as Robusta beans.
The pilot project is another example of efforts in Brazil, once the world's second-biggest cocoa producer, to rebuild the country's standing in the global industry after its output was devastated by disease in the 1980s.
"It's still somewhat of a timid project, but it is a promising project," Cooabriel's President Luiz Carlos Bastianello told Reuters in an interview.
The majority of Cooabriel's coffee producers in Bahia are already producing cocoa and the cooperative wants to help them boost their productivity, while also possibly picking up some new farmers along the way, Bastianello said.
Cargill is supporting the pilot project, which is financed by Cooabriel, as part of its aim to see major chocolate consumer Brazil become self-sufficient in cocoa production, Cargill's director of cocoa origination, Murilo da Silva Severo, said in an email.
"This partnership with Cooabriel has the potential to bring Cargill an annual increase of 1,500 (metric) tons of beans," Severo said, adding the quantity could increase and Cargill has already suggested Cooabriel take the project to the neighboring state of Espirito Santo.
Though similarities exist between conilon coffee farming and cocoa production, Cooabriel will have to contend with some challenges around market volatility and storing the cocoa beans, the cooperative's manager of new businesses, Alexandre Costa Ferreira, said.
"If we work on this correctly, we have everything we need to gain a lot of volume, a lot of scale, and put Brazil on a different level," Ferreira said.