Hopes high in Israel for ‘superhero’ cocoa that survived frontline conditions By Reuters

ESHKOL COUNCIL, Israel (Reuters) – Agriculture can develop in mysterious ways. Israeli researchers learned about it when the war in Gaza seemed to have destroyed their work on a hardier strain of the cocoa plant that could help alleviate global shortages of the bean.

Just days after Israel’s agricultural research center, the Volcani Institute, sent 140 seedlings to a facility in southern Israel to study how this tropical plant can be grown in dry conditions, the area was attacked by the Islamist group Palestinian Hamas.

The Oct. 7 attack that sparked the Gaza war paralyzed southern Israel and left the facility shut for months without electricity or irrigation.

“When we came back in January we saw everything around us, all the experiments that died,” said Talli Ilani, a researcher at the Darom R&D site.

All but 18 cacao seedlings.

Although the team hadn’t planned to test cacao strains specifically selected for drought resistance, they may have found just that.

“It’s a very unusual result to find a strain that can withstand 3-1/2 months of drought as new fresh seedlings and also a severe cold front,” said Ellen Graber, a senior scientist at the Volcano Institute . “It means we may be able to develop strains that can expand the growing regions for cacao.”

Bad weather and disease affected cocoa production and caused global cocoa prices to rise.

Graber now plans to clone the surviving plants—which he calls “super heroes”—and test them for other qualities, such as pest resistance, and identify the genes responsible for their resistance.

The Volcani Institute has developed resistant plant strains in the past, including drought-resistant wheat that ripens earlier and with higher nutrient content, and a cold-resistant basil that yields year-round.