Setting Priorities among Indigenous Fruit Tree Species in Africa: Examples from Southern, Eastern and Western Africa Regions - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 1

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Setting Priorities among
Indigenous Fruit Tree Species
in Africa: Examples from
Southern, Eastern and
Western Africa Regions

S. F RANZEL , 1 F.K. A KINNIFESI 2 AND C. H AM 3

1 World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya ; 2 World Agroforestry
Centre, ICRAF, Lilongwe, Malawi ; 3 Department of Forest and Wood
Science, University of Stellenbosch, Matieland, South Africa

1.1 Introduction

Priority setting in agricultural research has received considerable attention over
the years (Contant and Bottomley, 1988; Alston et al ., 1995; Kelly et al ., 1995;
Braunschweig et al ., 2000). The objective of prioritizing agroforestry tree
species is to determine the species for which domestication research (that is,
research on the selection, management and propagation of a plant (see Simons
and Leakey, 2004)) would be likely to have the highest impact. Impact, in turn,
needs to be defined in terms of specific objectives, such as increasing the
incomes of resource-poor farmers or conserving biodiversity. Formal priority-
setting procedures based on the calculation of producer and consumer
surpluses have been applied to a range of agricultural products (Alston et al .,
1995). However, such procedures require time-series data on the quantities
and values produced and consumed. Such data are not readily available for
most agroforestry products in the developing world.
In classical plantation forestry, the selection of species for improvement is
straightforward - a single end-product is involved, much information is available
about economically important species, and the clients, who are mostly
companies and governments, have close control over the genetic improvement
process. In agroforestry, in contrast, the choice of species is much more complex
and the clientele is very heterogeneous, consisting of many small-scale farmers
with differing needs. Farmers use many different tree species, and little scientific
or economic information is available for most of them. Moreover, farmers may
use a single species in several different ways and the products (e.g. fruits or