South Pacific Cacao

We are currently trialling some new technology for drying cacao beans. We introduced the Grainpro Solar Bubble Drier (SBD) to the Solomons and we arranged for a Grainpro rep to attend the Solomon Islands chocolate festival so they could demonstrate the unit. Post festival we were kindly provided with a unit by PHAMA and we have set it up in Togori village, Makira in what is the first trial for the Pacific. After the first trial we will send it down to our cacao farms at Waimarae, West Makira.

These SBDs are better than existing solar driers for a few reasons:

• They still dry the commodity in rainy and overcast conditions (common in Solomons)
• They are easy to ship to the end destination, packed inside a few boxes (approx 50kg total) and can be setup in 2 hours
• They are easy to pack away in case of cyclones

As well as those benefits, they are even better than the usual artificial driers used for the bulk market beans due to:

• Don’t need to chop firewood and maintain a fire for the 3 days+ of drying
• More cost effective

We’re very excited to be leading this innovative new technology within the Solomons and also leading this for the Pacific.

I’ve been exchanging some interesting emails with Grant Vinning, cocoa specialist in the Pacific, who is currently undertaking research for his upcoming book “Cocoa in the Pacific: First 50 years”.  Previously the standard line of thinking was that cocoa was planted in the Solomons around the 1950s, however he’s uncovered the following information that cocoa was being planted in the late 19th century:

“The earliest reference to cocoa in the Solomons that I can find is when Charles Morris Woodford, the energetic High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, visited John Stephens at Ugi in the Makira district in 1896.  Woodford observed that Stephens had planted cocoa trees around his house.  Woodford also observed that the trees were “diseased and neglected” suggesting they were planted in the late 1880s.  My source for this is Lawrence’s 2014 biography of Woodford.

Oscar Karl Svensen, a Norwegian who had massive holdings around Marau is another early cocoa planter.  In its extensive obituary in February 1964, the Pacific Islands Monthly listed an amazing number of crops that Svensen experimented with.  One of these was cocoa, something confirmed by Golden in 1993 when he wrote his collection of vignettes of early white settlers of the Solomons.  Svensen left the Solomon a very rich man 1912.  This suggests that his cocoa plantings would have occurred at around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

More support for the notion that cocoa was introduced into the Sols at the turn of the previous century comes from an unusual source.

Cocoa was introduced into Samoa by the 1890s.  Very early on it was clear that Samoans would not work on the plantations.  As a result, the German authorities in Samoa granted permission to the plantation companies in Samoa to import labour.  There were two basic sources of labour – China and Melanesia.  Whilst some companies imported Chinese labour, the biggest company of them all had an exclusivity arrangement to import cheaper labour from other German colonies in the Pacific.  Remember, before 1899 Santa Cruz was under German control.  Robert Louis Stevenson specifically mentioned Solomon Islanders in his 1892 account of troubles in Samoa.  Robb is more precise: some 5700 workers were brought from the Solomons and New Guinea, on three-year indentures on wages of 5 pounds a year .   When their time was up in Samoa, these labourers could have brought their cocoa growing skills back to the Solomons.  They may even have brought back some cocoa beans.  Solomon Islanders were also recruited to work in Fiji.  By the late 1890s, cocoa was an established crop there.  Again, the returnees could have brought this knowledge back with them. Finally, we know that a Trinitaro type cocoa was introduced from Vanuatu into Santa Cruz in 1935.  By that stage cocoa production in Vanuatu was around 2,770 t that came from around 60 plantations.“

Ugi is an island off the coast of Makira and Marau Sound is on the eastern end of Guadalcanal and visible from West Makira.  ACIAR is currently doing some genetic mapping of some cocoa in Makira, will be interesting to see those results later this year.

Grant also sent through this rather insightful and timeless snippet from the now defunct Pacific Islands Monthly, July 1933.

 

This is footage I took last week of cargo unloading from a ship at Kira Kira, capital of Makira-Ulawa province in Solomon Islands. Fortunately it was a fine day and the sea was calm.

For a province with population of 100,000, it is a national disgrace that there is still no wharf at the provincial capital.

I spent 8 days in Makira in January, including 4 days in Kira Kira. Although I love Makira and our people I was very disappointed with services and development in Kira Kira, which I could see have gone backwards in recent years, despite the abundant natural resources and billions of dollars of foreign aid poured into the Solomons over the past decade.

I have been visiting Kira Kira and Makira for nearly 38 years, since I was born in Solomons. My family village is Tawatana in West Makira.

Some key problems I saw were:

1) Banking – 5 years ago I could access my overseas money from Kira Kira. This time I could not. Here’s a showstopper for any external private investment or tourism.

2) Telcommunications:

• 2 years ago even though the Internet only worked in Kira Kira, it worked ok. This time it was unusable in Kira Kira ie impossible to send an email.
• The phone coverage on the island was worse this time than 2 years ago. At my village we have to walk 2 hours to access 2G phone coverage leaking from Guadalcanal island. There is always talk about new mobile towers. As we say “Coconut talk nomoa”, or just bush stories / hearsay.

3) Transport:

• The fact there is still no wharf in the provincial capital is an embarassment and shame for government and any major donors that put funding into Makira.
• The Kira Kira airstrip is still grass, combined with the rainiest weather in Solomons this means flights are regularly cancelled. Let’s not mention the terminal building.
• There is a single road that runs along most of the length of the island (130km), but due to constant rain, most rivers are regularly flooded and bridges washed out. Many rivers/crossings do not have bridges. Some bridges like the important one “crossing” the Waihoura river was poorly designed/built by a NZ construction company and is unusable.

As a half Australian and half Solomon Islander, I am building business in Makira using my own money to help promote rural development, starting with our beautiful cacao (cocoa) beans for the artisan chocolate market, but this is very hard with the poor services and infrastructure in Makira. Makira is one of the least developed parts of the Solomon Islands, with lowest levels of income per capita in Solomons despite being rich in cacao and coconut.

Solomon Islanders wake up, ask more and expect more from your politicians and others who are decision makers. Tell them to stop giving away roofing iron and water tanks and start progressing important provincial infrastructure and services. There is much natural wealth in the Solomons, enough to build a strong economy if there was strong leadership, governance, accountability and also a functional private sector that was not dependent on donor handouts.

If there are others out there that are able to assist in the development of Makira, then please contact me.

Brian Atkin

Founder and Managing Director of Makira Gold, premium quality cacao from Solomon Islands. www.makiragold.com

Some facts about Solomon Islands:

• Amongst the highest rates of gender based violence in the world, although many locals (oddly enough males) will dispute this.
• Ranked a lowly #156 out of 188 on the UNDP Human Development Index, this is the lowest ranking in the Asia Pacific region.
• Health indicators are very poor, for example 1 in 3 children suffer stunted growth from malnutrition, this is the highest rate of childhood stunting in the Pacific.
• Ranked #116 out of 190 on the World Bank global “Ease of doing business” index. Seems quite positive, so when looking at the breakdown of the ranking, the “paying tax” score is a major anomaly and is ranked in the 30s, close to Australia. Possibly further analysis required on that category.

This Article is also available on LinkedIn.

I have significant change in my life coming up as I exit from the Public Sector at the end of September so I can focus on Makira Gold.  This morning I remembered a letter I formally wrote to my two Uncles in early 2015, they are the leaders of our tribe in Makira, Solomon Islands.  My late grandfather was our tribal chief and as the eldest son of his eldest son, I would traditionally have inherited this role, however circumstances with me not living there make that impractical.

This letter signified my intentions to support our tribe and community with a cacao social enterprise.

(I have removed the names of my children)

—————–

Alick Salomesimao

Aoba Tribe

Ubuna
Peter Adams

Aoba Tribe

Tawatana

Dear Uncle Alick and Uncle Peter,,
I write to you to inform you that I will be returning to Tawatana in mid December later this year to visit my family, reconnect with our village and community, and discuss my ongoing support for our family and community into the future.

Firstly, please accept my sincere apologies for the long time since my last visit in 2007, when grandfather Basil Bunaon’e passed away

I often think fondly of our family and Tawatana, and regret that my responsibilities with my small family and my work in Brisbane keeps me away.

With my wife Meredith, whom I married in the village in 2004, I have a beautiful family with three young children, my 8 year old son Z, 6 year old daughter M and my 4 year old son, E.  I will bring some photos of them for you when I visit in December.
I have not been completely absent from the Solomons, for nearly 2 years I made a number of short trips to Honiara to volunteer my skills and experience in supporting an important Health program to protect Solomon Islands women from Cervical Cancer.  This has been a complex project, in which my mother and I have been working with the World Health Organisation, Ministry of Health and Medical Services, and other organisations.  I am pleased to advise that we have made excellent progress and earlier this year the Solomon Islands government launched a small vaccination program in Honiara for girls to be protected from Cervical Cancer later in life.  This is the same vaccine that protects girls in over 90 countries around the world such as Australia and New Zealand.  I hope that in a few years, the program will extend to protect our girls in Makira.

Mum was also working with the Ministry of Health and Family Planning Australia to start a new project to screen and treat women in the provinces and villages with early stages of Cervical Cancer.  This may be a number of years away from reaching West Makira, but planning this project is the important first step.

Protecting our girls and women from Cervical Cancer is a very important project for me, as our own aunties have passed away from this terrible disease.  I remember when my dear cousin Rex Tarani visited Brisbane about 15 years ago for a journalism course,  and spent much time on the phone talking with his mother who was very sick at the time in the late stages of cervical cancer.
Working in Australia and London over the past 15 years has given me many skills and experience, and I have established a strong network of professional contacts.  During stages of my working career I have been a Director responsible for up to 90 staff within the QLD public service with important responsibilities.  Recently one of my projects was a finalist for the Australian eGovernment awards, and I travelled to Sydney for the presentation.  When I visit I will bring a photo of myself receiving the finalist certificate from a Member of Parliament at the awards ceremony in Sydney.
The more I experience and read about many local and global issues, the more I realise that the way of life that we have in Makira and the Solomons is precious and must be preserved for our children, grandchildren and their children.  Many parts of the world have lost their connection to their land, their environment and their culture, and although they may have money they are not happy and do not have a purpose.

Although we must maintain our culture and land, we must also think about how to connect and prosper in the new global world – and what our place is in it.  We are no longer just influenced by our neighbouring villages and islands, but also what is happening in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Asia, the the European Union and other countries.

We must create opportunities for our children, so that they have a choice for their lives.  They may wish to remain in Tawatana, or they may wish to leave, or come back and forth – but we must provide them with choices and opportunities.  Other than standard healthcare and education, a key differentiator between our children in the village and children in more prosperous countries such as Australia is that children in these prosperous countries have choices in what they do with their lives.
To support our children, families and communities I intend to invest in creating agricultural-based business opportunities in and around Tawatana, initially with Cacao production .  I plan to support and strengthen our local cacao industry so that local families are able to gain a sustainable income from maintaining small farms of cacao trees, and that other locals are employed in areas such as fermentation, drying, transport and storage of cacao.  Initially, through my cousin Roni Maxwell, I have started with buying cacao from local farmers and selling it in Honiara.  Overtime we will look to see how our community of local farmers can improve yields and maximise profits from chocolate.

I call the business “Makira Gold”, which is symbolic of our rich and fertile land in Makira – the foundation of an agricultural business.  I am also fortunate enough to have the support of some Australian business consultants, who are excited by the prospect of providing their experience to mentor and guide an agricultural social business that is committed to positive cultural and social outcomes.
When I arrive in Tawatana with my dad George Atkin in December, I hope to meet with you and other family stakeholders to make plans for using our families and available land resources to provide financial opportunities for the family.

I look forward to my visit and seeing you in December.
Best regards,

Brian Atkin

I supplied quite a few dark chocolate and coconut milk chocolate bars for a Fair trade Fathers day stall at our kids school.

So if you’ve found out about us from getting a Makira Gold chocolate bar as a fathers day present, then I hope you enjoy it!

Those chocolate bars are have been hand crafted by me using Solomon Islands cacao beans.

The process of making bean to bar chocolate is:

Roasting, cracking, winnowing (to remove the husks), pre-grinding, grinding/conching in my tabletop melanger for 2 days, hand tempering, pouring into the chocolate molds, then finally wrapping and labelling.

The cacao beans are either grown and processed by my family in the Solomons, or we have sourced from other cacao farmers.

Our business exists to give Solomon Islands cacao farmers and their families the market access to a better and fairer price for their top quality cacao.

If you’d like to show some support for our enterprise, then please like our Facebook or Instagram pages, or even drop us a nice note through the Contact page.

Stay tuned for our chocolate products in local stores at some point early next year.

Thanks

Brian

​I’ll be down at the Brookfield Markets this Saturday selling some of our cacao nibs, roasted snacking beans and ground cacao.

I might also have some small tasting samples of my smallbatch bean to bar 75% dark chocolate, made from our Makira Gold cacao beans.

http://www.brookfieldmarkets.com.au/

An article about our story was published in the local Brisbane West monthly “The Local Bulletin”.  This came out today.

I had a couple of meetings over the past month with Barry Searle, the owner/editor of the paper and he’s captured our story really nicely.

These are some pictures of the article, I don’t believe it is available online.

We even have a line on the front cover.

The second page is about the benefits of cacao.  I wasn’t involved in that part of the article.

I’ve started a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe to raise funds to keep buying cacao beans from our farmers for the next 3 months and also to get a chocolate tempering machine.

Would be great to try to raise the $4,000 that we need.

https://www.gofundme.com/makiragold

Gender-based violence in Melanesia (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, PNG) are amongst the highest rates in the world.

– 73% of women in the Solomons feel that it is justified in some circumstances for a man to beat their wife.*

– 64% of women in the Solomons aged between 15 and 49 who have been in a relationship, have been physically or sexually abused, this violence was often severe.*

– 37% of women in the Solomons aged between 15 and 49 had been sexually abused before they were 15.*

 Gender inequity is a significant problem that I have many thoughts about, suffice to say that improving gender equity in Solomons is one of the long term mission objectives that I have – I spent two years working on national Cervical cancer prevention activities in the Solomons and am now working on my cacao project, of which cacao farming has tremendous potential for empowering women in rural communities.

As well as the direct linkage to gender equity through female cacao farmers, I am also looking at how we can do more for gender empowerment in our cacao business.

We have a few good ideas that we have already made a little progress towards. I look forward to sharing more about this in the future.

———————-

* Statistics from Secretariat  of  the Pacific  Community for  Ministry of Women, Youth &  Children’s  Affairs.  2009. Solomon Islands  Family Health  and  Safety Study:  A  study  on  violence  against   women  and  children.  National Statistics  Office. Ministry of  Finance and Treasury,  National Reform  and  Planning. Published by the Secretariat  of  the Pacific  Community 2009.

​Dear chocolate maker,
My name is Brian Atkin, I’m a half Solomon Islander living in Brisbane and I run a cacao social enterprise with smallholder farmers in my community on the island of Makira, Solomon Islands.
I don’t do it for earning an income.  I am fortunate enough to have a good job that pays for this enterprise and a very patient and supportive family.
We’ve been working on this for two years now, and are now shipping our sundried cacao beans into Brisbane.
I am about to bring in my second shipment of approx 170kg.
I’m looking for an ethical, artisan chocolate partner that wants to build a sustainable partnership with my community.  Cacao farming and supply to the specialty cacao market has the potential to change the lives of rural Solomon Islanders – lifting them out of poverty, empowering women and providing opportunities for their children.
If your first question is whether we have organic certification, then no we don’t.
Our smallholder farmers have no money, have completely organic practices and we certainly can’t afford the extravagant costs of first world organic certification.
Our production and shipping costs are high – we are smallholder farmers on a remote island in an archipelago at the other end of the world.  We can’t compete on price with plantation cacao farming from the major cacao growing regions.
But what we have in strengths more than makes up for this:
1) we have a supportive community with men and women eager to work.
2) we have what many consider amongst the most fertile lands anywhere – rich volcanic soil teeming with natural limestone rocks.
3) one of the highest annual rainfalls in the world (which can make sundrying a challenge).
4) well established but mostly poorly managed cacao farms everywhere – I sponsored a detailed field survey early this year and we surveyed more than 85 smallholder farmers with combined farms of 100 hectares across our village and the two neighbouring villages.
5) we have developed small scale fermentation and sundrying facilities in our village, the prices we are currently paying farmers for beans is higher than the bulk market price so we are having to turn farmers away.  This is before we have even started to increase prices to farmers to provide a fairer price as we scale up.
6) we have established the supply chain to get cacao beans to Brisbane and I carry all the risk – I pay my cousin a monthly salary and he has performance bonuses for successful exports to Brisbane.  I pay for all production and facilities costs, labour, export and import costs.  Our business employs three casual workers in our village, where the average casual daily rate is $20 AUD per day.
7) the eyes of many in the Solomons watch our progress, and one of our goals is that we can apply this same model across other parts of the Solomons – which means that there is potentially access to large volumes of cacao.  The Solomons currently exports 5,000 tonnes of cacao annually but most of it is smoke-dried cacao destined for the bulk markets in South East Asia.  There is one major buyer for most of this cacao, which sets the price through the chain of exporters, processors and middle agents all the way downstream to individual farmers.  This price is currently at a very low point in the cycle.

This is our story and we are looking for
special artisan chocolate partners to join us.
www.makiragold.wordpress.com

If you are interested and would like a further discussion, please let me kno