A recent push to establish an Australian cocoa industry is underway, with Australian Cocoa Ltd seeking $20 million capital from investors.

According to the Cairns Post, Australian Cocoa Ltd chief executive officer Jim McKerlie said a combination of declining global supply and the climate in Far North Queensland, agricultural tools and practices placed the region in good stead for the launch of a new industry.

“The big questions is ‘why the hell hasn’t Australia already got a cocoa industry’,” Mr McKerlie said.

“The answer is probably everyone was entrenched in sugar, and that’s what everyone wanted prime land for.”

Mr McKerlie said about 70 per cent of the global supply of cocoa was exported from West Africa, but due to environmental and economic factors the continent’s production was declining. Recent reports suggested this was by as much as 10 per cent in the last season.

Conversely, he said, Australia’s advanced farming technology, aligned with the cocoa belt – estimated to be between Tully and the Daintree – could mean the region would be more than three times as efficient in production rates. However, trials undertaken by the Department of Primary Industries in 1999 found cacao could not be grown in other places like Darwin and Broome.

“In Africa, they get about 700kg if cocoa seeds per hectare, our trials here, which we’ve done with (Mission Beach’s) Charley’s Chocolate suggest we’d get returns around 3 tonnes per hectare,” he said.

“The way you measure value is volume of dry beans per hectare.”

What’s more, it’s thought the varying microclimates with the Far North itself would also present different flavoured cocoa beans that would also help create premium markets within the local industry.

Mr McKerlie said after attending a meeting earlier this year that was held for Mossman’s sugar growers looking for alternative crops, he believed he could offer them buyouts for their land.

“The average age in that room was about 80. I could be wrong, but they’re not the people looking to learn a new trade. So we need to buy land, and they need a succession plan and if someone is in a house there, that’s three generations and has family history, we’ll carve that off and let them live there and farm their land,” he said, adding the majority of the $20 million raised would go towards buying land in the Far North.

The initial goal is to plant about 300ha of cacao with the initial funds raised and to show people how it’s going in the first three years.

“Then my vision is 1000ha and that’s when you can say you’ve really got an industry here,” Mr McKerlie said.

Mr McKerlie said the fund was structures as a stapled managed investment scheme and only qualified wholesale investors could participate in the offer.