Economics of On-farm Production of Indigenous Fruits - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 237

13 Economics of On-farm

Production of Indigenous
Fruits

D. M ITHÖFER 1 AND H. W AIBEL 2

1 International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, Nairobi, Kenya ;
2 Leibniz University of Hanover, Hanover, Germany

13.1 Introduction

The majority of the African population lives in rural areas, where poverty is a
major factor hampering development (World Bank, 2001). Rural people
frequently suffer from food shortages caused by adverse weather conditions,
political instability, poor market infrastructure and other constraints. To mitigate
the effects of food shortages, people in rural areas can use a wide range of
products from their natural environment. For example, a variety of edible wild
fruits are a popular natural resource (Maghembe et al. , 1998), being used for
home consumption and for sale (Cavendish, 2000; Mithöfer and Waibel,
2003). Indigenous fruits are mostly collected from communal areas, from
roadsides and from trees preserved in farmers' fields (Campbell, 1996). As the
entry barriers to fruit collection are low, poor households are more likely to get
involved in the collection of indigenous fruits (Dercon, 2000). Due to increasing
population pressure and other factors, such as agricultural policies (Chipika and
Kowero, 2000), the area of forest in Zimbabwe shrank by 14% from 1990 to
2000 and by 8% from 2000 to 2005 (FAO, 2005). Physio-geographical factors
may also contribute towards deforestation, as shown by Deininger and Minten
(2002) for Mexico. Other factors that may have contributed are increased prices
for alternative sources of energy used for cooking, e.g. instead of using
electricity, paraffin or gas, more households may rely on firewood or charcoal.
According to traditional rules, indigenous fruit trees (IFTs) have to be preserved
when clearing woodland in favour of agricultural production; nowadays, IFTs
are sometimes also being felled (Rukuni et al. , 1998).
The declining availability of indigenous fruits in the communal areas as a
result of increasing commercialization (see Ramadhani and Schmidt, Chapter 12,
this volume) and non-sustainable harvesting techniques pose a threat to this
indigenous natural resource. The need to ease pressure on natural resources and
to maintain the availability of IFTs gave rise to the World Agroforestry Centre's