Tom Scott takes us on a visit to the International Coca Quarantine Centre. You can tell it’s in England by the way they spelled “center.” But why does cocoa have to go into quarantine? It’s not the chocolate that they’re worried about, but the cocoa plants that grow it. What’s more, there are quarantine facilities for banana plants and potato plants and other crops before they can be certified safe for shipping to research facilities or to farms around the world.
We certainly don’t want a repeat of what happened to bananas, when Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel variety, leaving us only the Cavendish, and what may still happen to Cavendish bananas.
Source: neatorama