I visited the Barlovento Region of Miranda State, Venezuela, back in April-May 2006 while on a bean buying trip with Shawn Askinosie. We stayed in the town of Rio Chico.
The vast majority of the photos from the trip are on an archive DVD I don’t have easy access to. These were on an archive hard drive and are selects from my trip I was considering for inclusion in my book Discover Chocolate.
After a day visiting farms, a collection of pods we found.
Cacao is sometimes sun-dried directly on asphalt pavement which can lead to the cocoa picking up off odors and being exposed to vehicle exhaust. A better practice is to lay out the cocoa on a tarp. What you can’t see with the tarp image is that it’s very near the end of a dead-end road and so there is next to no vehicle traffic.
These were taken from nearly the same position, some kilometers from the ones above. Roosters can be seen running freely among the cacao trees, but are kept away from the fermentation baskets and the drying pad. (Phew.)Unfortunately, this farmer’s basket fermentation protocol resulted in a (too) high ratio of un/under-fermented beans. The guillotine belonged to Shawn, not the farmer.
There was strong technical support for making equipment for small makers. On the left is a very functional bean cleaning table with a built-in light. On the right is a cocoa butter press made from a an auto-shop hydraulic press that uses a tire jack as the source of pressure.
There was a lot of graffiti and wall art in Rio Chico – much of it political and some of it advertising for the business behind the walls.
There were cacao-themed murals all over Rio Chico. As I recall, these were adorning the walls of a collection center.
Bring out a camera and kids know what to do – no matter where you are.
Left: the mother of the children on the left. The cacao farm is behind the house in which they live. Right: Diego was the leader of the coop Shawn negotiated with to purchase cacao.Shawn (foreground left) in negotiations with Diego to purchase cacao. Shawn is offering pre-payment terms (a mistake as it turned out), while Diego wants nothing up front, preferring 100% of the money on pickup from the coops collection center – what he said were the standard terms.
Thoughts? Questions? Have you been to Venezuela and have experiences to share? Leave them in the comments below.