I have a chocolate business so I grow cacao. But I also grow pataxte, cupuasu, and other theobromas and herranias. I like them all. But chocolate is a good business and I eat some chocolate as well. The rest of them are nice to have but it’s not a business. If you have plenty of money and don’t need to make a profit with your farm. …
Peter
No. There is no money to be made here from Cacao. The climate is slightly wrong, but more importantly, the economics involved with trying to amend the soil for commercially grown cacao where there are already significant levels of subsoil aluminum saturation on very steep slopes where machinery or vehicles cannot access does not make sense economically. People grow coffee here, which is a little more forgiving of that, but eventually their management causes too high levels of Al saturation for that as well, and so they burn all the shrubs and plant Brachiaria, or just let it grow fallow and go grab another patch of forest to destroy.
I would argue it's not so important species selection for profitability. Site selection is more important. But if it's all about the economics, then the environment typically gets thrown under the bus. Most people in this world don't have the money to be amending soils or buying agricultural land with fertile soil. It's a lot easier and more profitable to go make fertile soil by turning rainforest into ash.
From my experience in this area of the country, I'm not sure what I would recommend other than coffee in terms of profitable export crops. For a national crop, I might tentatively recommend Caimito as it seems to be a fruit that a lot of Peruvians in this region really like, and there are a lot of trees that fruit successfully around here without any help.