Accelerated Domestication and Commercialization of Indigenous Fruit and Nut Trees to Enhance Better Livelihoods in the Tropics: Lessons and Way Forward - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 393

attracted attention with respect to the UN Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) and various environmental conventions (Garrity, 2004; Leakey et al. ,
2005).
Since the early 1990s, domestication strategies, approaches and techniques,
coupled with research and development on the commercialization and
marketing of agroforestry fruit tree products (AFTPs), has become one of the
major pillars of this paradigm, being especially recognised by the World
Agroforestry Centre and many of its partners around the world (Garrity, 2004;
Simons and Leakey, 2004; Leakey et al. , 2005).
The objectives of this chapter are: (i) to provide a global synthesis of
knowledge on indigenous fruit tree domestication, utilization and marketing
experiences from tropical Africa, Latin America and Asia; (ii) to summarize and
highlight the main opportunities, achievements and challenges that remain,
linking basic research and development initiatives to applications in the private
sector; and (iii) to propose future research areas. This final chapter of the topic
highlights key findings and puts in perspective the implications from the
preceding chapters in the context of lessons learned from decades of
domestication and commercialization of indigenous fruit trees in the tropics.
21.2 Indigenous Fruit Tree Domestication
21.2.1 Why domesticate IFTs?
Out of the 250,000 higher plant species in the world, less than 1% have been
domesticated as food plants and, of these, about 50% are fruit trees that are
either domesticated or semi-domesticated (Leakey and Tomich, 1999). In
Tanzania, about 326 indigenous plants have been described as edible (Ruffo et
al. , 2002) but few, if any, of these species have been domesticated through
deliberate tree improvement programmes (Akinnifesi et al. , 2006a). An
inventory of fruit trees in Nigeria and Cameroon showed that 56% of fruit trees
are indigenous (Schreckenberg et al. , 2006), and many of them are endemic to
some locations (A. Degrande et al. , unpublished). Farmers listed more than 200
species in Latin America that they would like to cultivate (Weber et al. , 2001).
The reasons for the long-time neglect of IFTs and failure to domesticate
them have been variously identified as being due to: (i) lack of information and
reliable methods for measuring their contribution to rural economies,
livelihoods of communities, and ecological services (Chapter 11); (ii) low
production incentives relating to markets and technology (Leakey et al. , 2005;
Chapters 11 and 13, this volume); (iii) bias in favour of large-scale agriculture
and conventional forestry (Russell and Franzel, 2004; Teklehaimanot, 2004;
Chapters 3, 8 and 11, this volume); (iv) colonial interventions that left a
profound legacy of neglect of smallholder farm production in favour of estate
farm producers (especially in eastern and southern Africa) and European
export product trading interests in West Africa; and (v) a weak interface
between private sector actors, researchers and extensionists in tree products
(Russell and Franzel, 2004).