Emir. J. Food Agric ● Vol 29 ● Issue 6 ● 2017 411 Weak levels of social capital as one of the causes of the fall of Mexican cacao production Dipl.-Kfm. Tomáš Hes 1 *, Ing. Haiyan Sulaiman 1 , Ing. Samuel Mintah 1 , José Samuel Banda Arrieta 2 , Billy José Ramírez Esquivel Bc 2 , Tomás Martínez Saldaña 3 , Jaime Antonio Ruiz Hernandez 2 1 Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Faculty of Tropical Agri Sciences, Kamýcká 129, 165 21, Prague 6, Czech Republic, 2 Chapingo Autonomous University, Economics-Management Science Division, Km. 38.5 Carretera México-Texcoco, Chapingo, Texcoco, Estado de México, C.P. 56230, México, 3 Colegio de Posgraduados, México INTRODUCTION Theobroma cacao (Food of the Gods) belonging to the family Sterculiaceae (alternatively Malvaceae) is one of the world’s most important crop consisting of three types: Forastero, Criollo and Trinitario. Cacao trees are cultivated in 58 countries with 4.6 million tons cacao beans produced worldwide and generating about US$ 4.5 billion per year, while the world production is distributed as follows: Africa 66%, Americas 15%, Asia 18% and Oceania 1% (Faostat, 2015). Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria and Cameroon are the first five countries in cacao producing (Table 1). The production of Mexican cacao is concentrated mainly in states of Tabasco and Chiapas, where the domestication began during the era of Maya civilization and developed into agroforestry systems (Gomez-Pompa and Kaus, 1990). The agricultural strategy which was applied by old civilizations in Mexico was focused to preserve plant diversity in order to increase the production and resistance against diseases (Whitkus et al., 1998). The main challenge faced by cacao farmers in Mexico today is the moniliasis fungus which leads to decrease of cacao yields and reduces the competitive capacity of producers in international markets (Díaz-José, 2014), also being accompanied by an inefficient analysis and data collection (Rajasri and Ramachandra, 2017). The Mexican agricultural sector also in recent decades suffers from climate variation, also due to a high sensibility of cacao plants to rainfall and sunshine in addition to mentioned pest infestation, which is a phenomenon also noted in Western Africa (Ajayi et al., 2010; Adeniyi and Ogunsola, 2014). However, not only biological and atmospheric influences are responsible for reduced levels of cacao production. There are many studies documenting the effect of social capital in improving the income of rural cacao producers for example in Nigeria (Agboola et al., 2016; Balogun et al., 2011), having a significant influence on both productivity and credit access Cacao beans belong to key agricultural crops on global scale, yet their production faces a dramatic fall in the capacity coupled with increasing global demand, often denominated as “the cacao crisis”. The fall of production of this crop in Mexican agriculture can be emblematic for global production. The country where cacao beans were first domesticated, is experiencing a vertiginous drop of plantation surface thus creating a serious concern not only for diversity of local production, but also for genetic and historical legacy as plantations are ebbing away due to substitution of cacao plantations with more rentable commercial crops. The paper tries to answer the question on the motives behind such a decrease on the base of data stemming from cacao producers of Tabasco region applying the lens of social capital and derives the conclusion that a collective action fuelled by social capital may be crucial for prosperity of the plantations. Collaboration and knowledge sharing thus may be of more importance for the future of cacao production than the fight against a single cause believed to be the fall of production such as the invasion of Moniliophthora roreri fungus. Keywords: Social capital; Cacao; Mexico; Moniliophthora roreri; Mincerian function Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: 013, 017, N96 ABSTRACT Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture. 2017. 29(6): 411-419 doi: 10.9755/ejfa.2016-09-1159 http://www.ejfa.me/ REGULAR ARTICLE *Corresponding author: Tomáš Hes, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences, Kamýcká 129, 165 21, Prague 6, Czech Republic. Tel.: +420 2243. E-mail: 2586rm@gmail.com Received: 23 September 2016; Revised: 02 May 2017; Accepted: 14 May 2017; Published Online: 24 May 2017