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Is Ecuador home to the world's best chocolate?

5 June 2013 Last updated at 23:08 GMT By Irene Caselli Esmeraldas province, Ecuador Ecuador has some of the oldest varieties of cocoa trees, which have distinctive flavours In the lush province of Esmeraldas, on Ecuador's northern border with Colombia, farmers are proud to say they produce "black gold".

They are not talking about oil, Ecuador's main export, but cocoa beans.

The smooth, bitter-tasting paste extracted from the beans is the key ingredient in chocolate and one of this Andean country's claims to fame.

It is also deeply connected to the history of Ecuador, the world's largest exporter of cocoa until the beginning of the 20th Century.

Plant disease and the rise of new cultivations in British and French colonies across Africa and Asia saw Ecuador lose its top spot in the early 1900s.

Cocoa started losing its appeal to farmers and was replaced by bananas and coffee, which were more lucrative.

West Africa became the world's leader in cocoa production and exports, with a focus on so-called "bulk" or "ordinary" beans, used for processed chocolate-flavoured candies and sweets.

Connoisseurs say fine chocolate has as many distinctive tastes as fine wine. Vintage chocolate

"Fine" or "flavour" beans, the top-quality varieties used in gourmet products because of their superior taste, account for only 5% of the world's cocoa production, but demand is increasing.

Much like wine, chocolate reflects the flavours of the region where cocoa beans are grown, and how they are dried and fermented.

Over the last decade, as the demand for more flavourful cocoa has risen, Ecuador has emerged as the pre-eminent exporter of fine beans.

It is a favourite destination for globetrotting chocolatiers in search of the best, and cocoa production has also become a sustainable source of income for Ecuador's farmers.

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After 250 years exporting cocoa, nobody knew how to make chocolate in this country”

End Quote Santiago Peralta Ecuadorean chocolate maker "Farmers didn't use to pay much attention to cocoa," says Ignacio Estupinan, a 66-year-old farmer who is known in the area as Don Nacho.

"Now everybody knows how valuable cocoa is. It's the best business we have," he adds.

Scholars believe cocoa plants first grew in the Amazon basin, possibly in the area that now corresponds to Venezuela, another large cocoa exporter.

However, a recent archaeological study suggests that Ecuador may have been the original home of the cocoa bean.

Archaeologist Francisco Valdez found ceramic pottery dating to 3,300 BC that contained microscopic remnants of cocoa.

The discovery, made in Ecuador's southern Amazonian region of Zamora Chinchipe, suggests that cocoa beans were being harvested and consumed more than 5,000 years ago.

The West's love affair with chocolate started much later - in the 16th Century, when Aztec ruler Montezuma introduced Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes to a spicy chocolate drink, known as "xocolatl".

When sugar was added to the mix, the drink became a fad in Europe, and cocoa much sought after.

Ecuador played a key role in introducing chocolate to the West.

Unlike other Spanish colonies in South America, where gold and silver were abundant, Ecuador was exploited for its cocoa.

A scene depicting Spanish explorer Hernan Cortez meeting Montezuma , king of the Aztecs

Ecuador's native cocoa beans are known as "Nacional" or "Arriba", a name believed to derive from the location of its discovery. Arriba means "up river" and many cocoa plantations were located along the Guayas river, which flows towards the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

Top quality

In her book Chocolate Unwrapped, Sarah Jane Evans, one of the UK's leading food writers and a founding member of the Academy of Chocolate, says that the characteristic of Ecuador's fine cocoa is "a floral profile with blackcurrants and spice."

Chocolate tasters say the aroma of Ecuador's cacao is more complex because Arriba beans vary hugely in taste and size according to the area in which they are grown.

"Each bean has a special, different flavour," says Santiago Peralta, founder of Pacari, a successful Ecuadorean brand of fine organic chocolate.

Mr Peralta says the quality of Ecuador's chocolate is due to the country's diversity in terrain and equatorial location on the equator.

While Ecuadorean chocolate is known for its floral characteristics, some beans taste more like fruits, while others have a nutty flavour.

Continue reading the main story It takes six months for cocoa beans to ripen. Harvests take place twice a yearThe beans, which are covered in a white pulp, are removed from the podsBeans are put in large heaps and covered up to ferment. This takes about a week. and is when the cocoa flavour starts to developBeans are then dried for a week then taken to the chocolate factoryThey are then roasted, and separated from their shells in hulling machinesThe insides of the bean, called nibs, are turned into a liquid or chocolate liquorThe chocolate liquor is blended with cocoa butter, and other ingredients and stirred for several hoursThe resulting thick mixture comes out and is poured into bar-shaped containersThe bars are now ready to be packaged and eaten, about four days after the cocoa beans reached the factory"We tailor-make our chocolate according to the cocoa beans we receive," Mr Peralta says, adding that he tastes every new batch of beans that arrives.

Mr Peralta's dedication is one of the reasons Pacari has become the success story of Ecuador's cocoa boom.

"We wanted to have the best quality - it was the only chance we had to make it," he explains.

"After 250 years exporting cocoa, nobody knew how to make chocolate in this country."

In 2002, together with his wife, Carla Barboto, Mr Peralta went looking for old cocoa trees, while developing a fair-trade model to give farmers better pay for a better product.

The experiment worked. His chocolate company won several prizes at the 2012 International Chocolate Awards for its combination of flavours and a successful alternative business model.

One of its bars, Raw Chocolate, was judged the best "dark plain" bar in the world.

Pacari's Ecuador-based production did not go unnoticed.

Other Ecuadorean companies started making their own chocolate and foreign chocolate-makers came to Ecuador not only to source their beans, but also to produce bars.

Local pride

New York-based Red Thalhammer visited several cocoa-producing countries before settling for Ecuador.

A native of Austria, Ms Thalhammer had previously worked on branding for gourmet food and was not ready to let go of those high standards for her own chocolate.

"Ecuador has super-high quality cocoa," Ms Thalhammer says.

She started her own chocolate line, called Antidote Choco, made entirely in Ecuador.

Several other chocolate-makers have followed suit. One company, Ecuatoriana de Chocolates, opened up a factory in 2007 to help chocolatiers go from bean to bar in one location.

The implications go far. For example, in Esmeraldas, one of the poorest provinces in the country, farmers can now get more money if they produce high quality cocoa.

"In the past, Esmeraldas was not considered a cocoa-growing area, but now it has been producing prize-winning chocolate," says Daysi Rodriguez, a community worker in Esmeraldas. "This fills us with pride!"

On his farm, Don Nacho looks at a 50-year-old cocoa tree.

He works on his own on the 60-hectare farm, where he grows 30 different varieties of fruit, besides cocoa.

He seems tired, but he also seems to care about something else, more important.

"We have to work together to make our country look good abroad," he says.

Ecuador's new black gold may be providing a rather stable future for farmers, while at the same type putting Ecuador back on the chocolate map.

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Where are the world's gay athletes?

30 April 2013 Last updated at 21:28 ET By Kate Dailey BBC News Magazine Jason Collins (left) said he had suffered "years of misery" because of his sexuality NBA player Jason Collins made headlines this week as the first active competitor in a major American professional sport to announce he is gay. Will other athletes across the globe follow suit?

Jason Collins is far from the first pro athlete to come out: indeed, women's sports have had lesbian competitors for decades.

Men in individual sports, such as Olympic diver Greg Louganis or professional bowler Scott Norton, are also part of a growing group of gay male athletes.

But for years, pundits have wondered when the US would see an openly gay team player from one of the big four professional sports: baseball, football, basketball or hockey.

(Players like baseball's Billy Bean or basketball's John Amaechi have come out after retirement).

Team sports are viewed as the final frontier, the last blow against a macho culture that insinuates gay men cannot compare in terms of strength and grit with straight men, and would be a disruptive presence on a tight-knit team.

Collins' announcement, says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, a website devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) athletics, is the culmination of a slow, steady march towards acceptance.

"It was inevitable," he says. "We weren't going to wait another 20 years. The groundwork has been laid."

Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas came out as gay in 2009

That groundwork was put in place due to several factors: the existence of gay and lesbian athletes in individual sports, the presence of straight allies within pro teams, and a cultural change in the US that finds fewer and fewer Americans opposed to homosexuality, and an increase in visible LGBT members throughout US society.

Still, despite the gains made in gay rights in the past years, Collins stands alone as an out, active professional athlete on a major team sport. And he joins a very small fraternity of men across the world who can make the same claim.

In the West, rapid cultural change has created a more welcoming environment for gay players, though there are still very few making public declarations about their sexuality.

In 1990 the English footballer Justin Fashanu came out as gay, and was the subject of criticism, scorn and lurid speculation. He later killed himself after being accused of sexual assault. (In his suicide note, he claimed the sex was consensual.)

Nineteen years later, the Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas came out to little fanfare, followed in 2011 by Swedish footballer Anton Hysen.

Thomas stands as "an example of someone who came out, has been accepted by his teammates and moved on just fine", says Brian Kitts, co-founder of the You Can Play project, a support system for gay athletes and their straight allies in team sports.

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For many, Jason Collin's announcement is seen as a major breakthrough. But will it lead to more players coming out?

"The coming out journey of every gay person is different," says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports. "It doesn't mean 'Jason Collins comes out, oh, I will too'."

But others think the positive reaction following Collins announcement - especially if he is picked up by another team - could be influential. And the big media attention granted to the first gay player will put less pressure on the second.

"You get sort of a societal shrug," says Brian Kitts, founder of You Can Play. "It becomes interesting but it's not necessarily newsworthy.

Earlier this year, pro football player and LGBT ally Brendon Ayanbadejo said that four football players might soon come out together, but so far details have been sparse.

But while Western culture as a whole has become more accepting of gay men and women, those who follow the progress of gay athletes say the football culture in Europe and the UK has a long way to go to make the sport more welcoming.

"It's much more visceral," says Buzinski of the football fan culture in Europe in the UK, which has been marred by public acts of homophobia and racism.

"I'm not saying that when Jason Collins takes the floor, there might not be some fan that says something homophobic, but another fan would turn around and say shut up. It wouldn't be that same reaction where the crowd feeds off it.

"In a lot of European places, that kind of anger is hard to tamp down."

Many clubs have recognised this as a problem.

"There's now campaigns in many many countries to end the homophobic taunting," says Kelly Stevens, officer of communications for the International Gay Games.

"It's getting down to a handful of countries and leaders that haven't spoken out against it."

He says straight allies like Ben Cohen, the former England rugby player, have done well to make sports seem more inclusive.

But the shift in culture will take a long time to complete.

"It takes a while before an environment is comfortable enough that people can come out," Stevens says.

In other parts of the world, the question of when a pro athlete on a team sport will come out is less pressing than other basic human rights issues.

English soccer player Justin Fashanu's family says his career suffered after he came out

"In some countries it is just dangerous in general to be gay. To be a gay athlete would be impossible," says Stevens.

But even in less accepting countries, gay athletes have found a way to make their voices heard. In Russia, it is illegal to hold a gay pride parade, and fans of a professional club in St Petersburg recently called for the team to exclude gays and minorities.

But there is also an organised league for amateur gay athletes.

"The government will accept it, because it's not political - it's just athletics," says Stevens of such clubs in Russia and Bulgaria.

And across the globe, more and more teenagers are refusing to live in the closet or abandon the sports the love.

That means that in the future, fewer players will "come out" upon entering professional sports - they will instead already be out.

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