Papua New Guinea cocoa: A golden ticket for farmers?

When Pastor Samuel Namba was a baby, his mother saw the sky turn black and red with the ash and lava of the 1951 Mount Lamington eruption. She wrapped him in wet tapa [bark cloth] and ran with him to hide in a cave until the smoke cleared.  

Namba was too young to remember the eruption, but 75 years later, its imprints remain in the rich volcanic soil that surrounds his village of Kawowoki, on Oro Province’s Managalas Plateau — soil that’s turned out to be ideal for growing Theobroma cacao, the shrubby plant that yields the raw ingredients of chocolate.

So alongside his pastoral duties, Namba grows cocoa, tending seedlings in bamboo tubes until they’re strong enough to plant out in the bush. He also buys wet beans from other cocoa farmers and sun-dries them on sheets of corrugated iron, to sell to buyers beyond the Plateau.  

“Right now, I’m trying to make a fermenter so I can dry them faster and improve the quality, because sometimes the ones I dry get rejected,” he tells me across a spread of reddish-brown beans. 

Namba’s story is Papua New Guinea (PNG) cocoa in a nutshell: volcanic soil, generations of knowledge, world-class beans… and a lot of effort to get them out of the bush, properly processed, and into a market that will pay for them.

Old trees, new possibilities 

Across the Managalas Plateau, the evidence of cocoa’s complicated past is visible from the road: leggy, lichen-covered trees, planted decades ago and then abandoned. The Plateau is isolated; getting beans to market is expensive and unreliable, and fluctuating international prices left many farmers feeling that the crop just wasn’t worth their time.

But inspired by rising global cocoa prices, driven by production shortfalls in West Africa, some Managalas landowners have started tending to those old trees and planting new ones. This time, they have support. Local NGO Managalas Conservation Foundation (MCF), backed by Landscape Alliance and the European Union (EU), has been mapping cocoa presence and volume across the Plateau.

Clan groups are now planning a network of warehouses to store cocoa alongside other commodities, such as coffee, okari nuts, vanilla, eggs and vegetables. This will make it easier to pool transport costs, maintain quality standards, and meet the traceability requirements that new legislation such as the EU Deforestation Regulation demands of exporters.

Gold in the gardens 

Cocoa makes sense for PNG. Theobroma cacao thrives in tropical climates, rich volcanic soils and dappled shade: an easy fit with local agroforestry practices and a strong incentive to keep rainforest canopies intact. The country’s mountainous terrain also offers a degree of climate resilience, since growers can shift to higher elevations as temperatures rise. And around 97% of PNG’s territory is customarily owned, meaning most rural families have land on which to farm.

People have grown cocoa here since 1884, when Samoan businesswoman Emma Coe — now the namesake of PNG’s largest local chocolate retailer — planted the first Theobroma tree in Kokopo, East New Britain. Today, Indigenous smallholders produce more than 95% of the country’s cocoa, with around two million of the archipelago’s 11 million people depending on it as their primary income source. 

When they’re processed properly, PNG’s beans are prized. The country’s diverse climatic conditions and soil types produce a range of distinct flavour profiles that single-origin chocolate makers and connoisseurs actively seek out. Last year, PNG Prime Minister James Marape urged the country’s millions of smallholders to capitalise on that interest. “The world wants what we grow,” he said, “and they are willing to pay top prices for it. Our gold is not only in the ground. It is in our gardens.” 

From ATM to artisan crop 

But the gap between PNG’s potential and its smallholders’reality is wide.

“Historically, farmers in PNG called cocoa the ATM: it was just something you went to when you needed a bit of cash,” says University of Sydney cocoa research fellow Tom Swan. That changed from 2006, when the cocoa pod borer Conopomorpha cramerella spread through the country, damaging developing pods and slashing yields. Intensive pest and disease management became necessary: a considerable ask for subsistence farmers with little support.

In Managalas, there are no certified nurseries or budwood gardens in the province, which limits farmers’ access to quality planting material. “This means that many new cocoa farmers are using the old, long-abandoned cocoa trees for seeds,” says Will Unsworth, Landscape Alliance’s PNG Program Manager. “These older varieties are less tolerant to pests and disease, and ultimately produce lower volumes than newer varieties can.” 

Soil depletion is another constraint. “Many people in PNG rely on the inherent soil capacity, because many cocoa-growing soils are volcanic, alluvial, or raised coral reef soils — all very rich in minerals and nutrients,” Swan says. “But that depletes over time, and if farmers don’t replenish the nutrients, crop yields will decline dramatically.” Simple interventions like trenching discarded pods or composting around trees can help; fertilizer is usually too costly.

Then there’s the matter of processing. After harvest, beans need to be fermented and dried properly to develop flavour and prevent spoilage. Some Managalas growers handle this themselves, as Samuel does with his corrugated iron sheets and improvised fermenter. Others sell wet beans to processors locally or in Popondetta. But the quality of those processors varies, and inconsistent output limits access to higher-value markets. 

“Smoke tainting has haunted PNG beans in the global marketplace,” says Howard-Yana Shapiro, a global cocoa expert and distinguished senior fellow at Landscape Alliance. Around 20 years ago, the country’s reputation for smoke taint — caused by leaks in wood-fired dryers — “halved the purchasing of their beans.” Mould from poor post-harvest storage has compounded the problem.

Alongside these farm-level and processing challenges, “the process of getting a licence to grow, ferment, buy, sell and export cocoa is difficult and opaque,” Unsworth says. “This represents another limit to access for many farming communities.”

Beyond the bean 

The warehouse network that Managalas’ communities and their conservation partners are building is designed to address several of these constraints at once: secure, collective storage; shared transport; consistent processing; and the documentation trail that export markets increasingly require. 

This sort of systemic support has already made a difference elsewhere. In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, communities that committed to cocoa and straightened out their value chains are now reaping rewards from rising prices. The model they used — the One Health Initiative led by University of Sydney’s David Guest — “includes much more than production; it is a systematic plan for the communities’ health and welfare,” says Shapiro. “It has now been adopted widely.”  

That’s the kind of model Managalas is aiming for. It’s slow going: the infrastructure is still being developed and trust is being re-established with buyers across the value chain. But across the Plateau, farmers like Samuel Namba are showing that cocoa’s future will not come from the beans alone. Instead, it will depend on the systems built around them: from seed stocks and fermentation to roads, warehouses and markets. 

For more information on this project, please contact Landscape Alliance’s PNG Programme Lead Will Unsworth: [email protected]

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