High hopes in Israel for 'super hero' cocoa that survived frontline conditions

ESHKOL COUNCIL, Israel (Reuters) - Farming can develop in mysterious ways. Israeli researchers learned about that when the war in Gaza seemed to have all but wrecked their work on a more resilient strain of the cocoa plant that could help alleviate a global shortage of the beans.

Just days after Israel's agriculture research centre, the Volcani Institute, sent 140 seedlings to a facility in southern Israel to study how this tropical plant could be grown in dry conditions, the area came under attack by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

The Oct. 7 assault that sparked the war in Gaza, paralysed southern Israel and left the facility shut down 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 R&D Darom site.

Everything except for 18 cocoa seedlings.

While the team had not planned on testing the selected cocoa strains specifically 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 severe cold front," said Ellen Graber, a senior principal scientist at the Volcani Institute. "It means that we may be able to develop strains that can expand the growing regions for cocoa."

Bad weather and disease have hurt cocoa production and sent global cocoa prices soaring.

Graber now plans to clone the surviving plants - which she refers to as "super heroes" - and test them for other qualities such as resistance to pests, and identify the genes responsible for their resilience.

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

(Reporting by Alessandro Diviggiano, Rami Amichay and Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)