Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cosmetic oils, biodiesel, medicinal products). In terms of understanding
preferences for fruits, the major drive forces would be the extent to which they
are able to meet the subsistence and cash-income needs of the producers and
market participants. Industrial needs or interests, and organization project
promotion activities may also influence decision making at all levels.
The preoccupation of researchers and governments with the need to
domesticate IFTs seems to be prevalent across all the regions, and can be traced
back to the 1920s in Latin America (Popenoe and Jimez, 1921; Clement
et al.
,
2004; Chapter 6, this volume) and the 1970s in Africa (Okafor, 1983; Kang
et
al.
, 1994). The initial approaches for setting priorities for domestication in the
three continents were overly top-down and rarely involved farmers or users.
They involved organizations deciding what species to work on in terms of their
current knowledge, experience and importance of the species. However, these
provided a vital foundation on which subsequent work was based.
Several meetings were organized by ICRAF and partners in Africa to
brainstorm and identify IFTs of importance. In 1995, ICRAF and the SADC
(Southern African Development Community) Tree Centre organized a
workshop in Swaziland on range-wide collection of
Sclerocarya birrea
and
Uapaca kirkiana
. These were collected and exchanged between participating
countries. A regional conference was devoted exclusively to indigenous fruit
trees (Maghembe
et al.
, 1995; Shumba
et al.
, 2000) and another international
conference concentrated on domestication and commercialization of non-
timber forestry products (Leakey and Izac, 1996).
In South-east Asia, Gunasena and Roshetko (2000) documented the
efforts to identify priority tree species to domesticate in each country. This
exercise was carried out in a regional workshop at Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in
1997 (involving Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), where
organizations had listed the species considered important. Since this did not
particularly focus on IFTs or prioritize them, it is important to mention that
some IFTs have been listed by various organizations as species of priority,
notably:
Durio zibethinus
(durian),
Phyllanthus acidus
(star gooseberry),
Garcinia mangostana
(mangosteen),
Annona mangostana
(manggis),
Lansium
domesticum
(lanzones),
Tamarindus indica
(tamarind),
Syzygium
spp.,
Artocarpus
spp.,
Anarcardium occidentale
(cashew),
Chrysophyllum cainito
(star apple),
Castanopsis
spp. (chestnut) and
Nephelium lappaceum
(rambutan). The list is long but did not discriminate between fruit and non-fruit
trees, and timber species were dominant, followed by fruit trees. The relative
preferences in terms of priority were not clear.
Similarly, the list of fruits considered as important in Latin America is also
long; and these are mostly in the Amazon region. In Brazil, researchers had
created awareness on the importance of peach palm (
Bactris gasipaes
) as early
as the 1920s (Popenoe and Jimenez, 1921, cited in Chapter 4), and research-
driven efforts in the past 25 years have concentrated on fruit and heart-of-palm
development with varying levels of success, creating new crops including fully
domesticated heart-of palm grown in high-density and high-input
monocultures, which is widely traded on European and American markets
(Clement
et al.
, 2004).
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