Homegarden-based Indigenous Fruit Tree Production in Peninsular India - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 94

fruits, spices, condiments) from the nearby forests, especially during food
shortages. Muraleedharan et al . (2005) documented 229 non-timber forest
products (NTFP) from 73 plant families, including 68 trees and 35 shrubs, that
are collected from three sites in the Kerala region of the Western Ghats, which
included many significant wild fruits. Such a diversity of products, available
year-round either from the homegardens or from the adjacent forests, is
expected to contribute to food security, especially during 'lean' seasons. In
addition, a substantial quantity may be also sold in the local markets, which
provides a major source of income for the cultivators.
As the forest-derived NTFPs become commercially valuable, however,
market forces start to control their extraction, leading to over-exploitation in the
wild - thus driving them closer to extinction. Field observations suggest that tribal
peoples and others selectively harvest fruits from trees that produce bumper
yields, thereby ensuring relatively high economic returns per unit effort
(Muraleedharan et al ., 2005). That is, the extraction of NTFPs is generally
dependent on the opportunity cost of collection - with a higher cost for a less
frequent commodity than a more common product. To maximize returns,
therefore, destructive harvesting practices are resorted to: e.g. branches of
Emblica officinalis , Myristica dactyloides , Mangifera indica and Hydnocarpus
pentandra are lopped, and Alnus sinuata , a woody climber, is cut off at the base
to avoid the effort of climbing up to harvest the fruits. A few days later, the fallen
fruits are gathered from the ground; a process that sometimes results in the death
of an entire population of plants. Extraction patterns of Sapindus emarginatus
and Emblica officinalis have also changed from the subsistence mode to large-
scale commercial removals (Muraleedharan et al ., 2005). The domestication of
such species in homegardens may go a long way towards safeguarding these
genetic resources and their diversity in the wild. Homegardens can thus serve as
loci for conserving the shrinking NTFP resources in the wild.
Wild fruits also bring diversity to the diet, serve as a source of vitamins and
minerals, and are valuable sources of indigenous medicines (Leakey, 1999;
Muraleedharan et al ., 2005). In certain cases where homegardens already
contained such species, the consumption of fruits and vegetables alleviated
deficiencies in iodine, vitamin A and iron (Molina et al ., 1993) and made the
children of the garden owners less prone to xerophthalmia (Shankar et al .,
1998). In experimental studies conducted in South Africa, the target families
significantly increased their year-round production and consumption of
vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables compared with the control group without
gardens (Faber et al ., 2002). Wild fruits also confer important health benefits
against malnutrition and possibly improve resilience against epidemics such as
HIV/AIDS (Barany et al ., 2001). Consequently, there is now a growing
awareness that homegardening combined with nutrition education can be a
viable strategy for improving household nutritional security for at-risk
populations, particularly women and children. However, few attempts have
been made to investigate the indigenous species in terms of their traditional
characteristics and nutritional value; neither have significant efforts been made
to build on the potential of traditional food supply systems, integrating them
into homegarden projects (Cleveland and Soleri, 1987).