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 415

a wider range of household and market requirements, such as fruit traits (fruit
size, load, taste), seasonal year-round availability (early-, mid- and late-season
crops), and nutritional characteristics for enhanced health (Chapters 6-9). It is
important to understand how nutritional values of fruits vary with processing
and products (Chapter 16).
21.6.2 Technology change, adoption and scaling-up
The technology-transfer approach, which is developed by researchers and
passed to farmers through extension agents, has characterized conventional
breeding and horticulture, but this has been gradually replaced over the past
decades by more participatory approaches (Chapters 2, 8 and 9). Farmers and
researchers have complementary areas of expertise and gaps in their
knowledge, so that integrating this knowledge from both parties through
participatory processes typically has the most profound effects (Place et al. ,
2001). Farmers themselves can make several adaptations to introduced
systems, such as the case of camu camu in Peru (Penn, 2006), and in selection
of elite cultivars of IFTs in West Africa (Leakey et al. , 2003, 2005; Tchoundjeu
et al. , 2006) and southern Africa (Akinnifesi et al. , 2004a, 2006).
Adoption studies are generally very limited, as shown in the various
chapters. Proper documentation of the lessons learned from participatory
domestication needs to be generated, and successful examples have been
presented in Chapters 8 and 9. There is a general need for household-level and
landscape-level adoption studies and large-scale scaling-up of improved IFTs.
Studies of technology adoption must inform other stages of technology
development and dissemination to be of maximum benefit (Place et al. , 2001).
Such studies must integrate socio-economic with biophysical variables and
analyses. Studies concerning problem identification, ethnobotanical surveys and
priority-setting for indigenous fruit trees should be coupled with a strong
emphasis on ex ante impact analyses of potential adoptability, pseudo-adoption
and dis-adoption, and should help to focus research on identifying improvement
and management practices that would address users' and farmers' concerns at
the outset. A very good example of ex ante impact analysis of IFTs in Zimbabwe
was reported by Mithöfer (2005). This provided an insight into what level of
technology change would stimulate adoption and impact.
There is a general lack of field data on the production economics of IFTs,
their investment requirements, and cost-benefit analysis of alternative options.
Such data would be critical for decision making at household and policy levels.
In order for technologies such as IFT domestication to be attractive to farmers,
their investment must provide short-term pay-offs and be sustainable.
However, few studies in this topic or in the broader literature provide
conclusive and evidence-based data on economic profitability and payback
periods of IFT cultivation or wild collection (Mithöfer, 2005; Chapters 6, 9, 12,
13 and 15, this volume, made some attempts). Until tree domesticators are
able to demonstrate convincingly that IFT cultivation is profitable and
economic pay-off is high enough, adoption by farmers will remain low.