IBM has launched an interesting strategy in Africa, which aims to help the nations on the continent take advantage of perhaps its most important crop: cocoa, the precursor of the chocolate, the magic food which is essential to sustaining (happy) life in kids and women, as well as some men.

The computer giant has instructed its scientists to research the genome of the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao. Analyzing its genetic makeup is expected to yield ways of making cocoa crops, essential to many poor areas in Africa, much more resistant to droughts and pests. Also, production could be significantly raised.

The world's top exporters of cocoa were last year Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, with Africa supplying around 70 percent of the world's cocoa.

The company also announced the opening, this week, of a cloud-computing center in Johannesburg, South Africa. Of course, IBM is a profitable company and everything it does has a foreseeable profit associated with it. IBM is apparently trying to pull a publicity stunt for its Blue Gene supercomputer, which would be used to analyze the cocoa genome, according to Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, interviewed by PC World.

One of IBM's partners is Mars (the candy company, not the planet), while another is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The research would eventually be made available for free through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture. Washington State University will also support the effort.

IBM also understands that the most profitable investments are those in emerging markets such as Africa, where development will see current, let's say, land prices, increase ten-fold or more in some areas.

Theobroma cacao is native to the deep tropical region of the Americas, being actually domesticated in lowland South America. The beans constituted both a ritual beverage and a major currency system in some Mesoamerican civilizations.