Mars has said that an extra one million metric tons, or 1.1 million shorttons, of cocoa will be needed to satisfy global demand by 2020 if no serious efforts are put in place to increase productivity in nations such as Ivory Coast, where farmers are already turning to alternative crops such as rubber or abandoning their small holdings altogether.
Today's commercial rockets can lift only about 10 tons into space, far short of what is needed to enable deep-space exploration returning to the Moon, and later venturing on to Mars the things that are and should be NASA's core mission.