Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
PRODUCTION, VARIETIES, AND HARVEST
Major producing countries
Pomegranates are grown on all continents with the excep-
tion of Antarctica. However, this plant is commercially
cultivated in the Mediterranean basin (North Africa, Egypt,
Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus,
Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal), Asia (Iran, Iraq, In-
dia, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam,
Thailand, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan,
Kirgizstan, Armenia, and Georgia), the Americas (United
States, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil), South Africa, and
Australia (Holland et al., 2009).
Few statistics related to pomegranate production, area,
or sales are available. India (more than 100,000 ha) is the
largest producer, followed by Iran (more than 65,000 ha),
Turkey (almost 10,000 ha), Tunisia, and Spain (3,000 ha)
(Stover and Mercure, 2007). India reported annual produc-
tion of 1,200,000 tons, followed by Iran (700,000 tons),
Turkey (300,000 tons), the United States (100,000 tons),
Spain (60,000 tons), Tunisia (30,000 tons), and Israel
(20,000 tons). According to the University of California
Cooperative Extension, California produced approximately
17,000 tons of pomegranate fruit on about 6,639 ha in
2009.
Varieties
The Punica genus contains only two species, first of which
is better known as the pomegranate ( Punica granatum L.),
and second of which is the Socotra or Yemen pomegranate
( Punica protopunica Balf. f. 1882), native to island of
Socotra, not edible, and not commercially available,
though it is cultivated (Levin, 2006). Many variety names
are distinctive to the region where they are grown, and
genetic origins of these varieties are mostly undecided.
Therefore numerous varieties and hundreds of types exist
across many countries. Cultivars are often categorized as
sweet, sweet/sour, and sour; early-, mid-, or late-season;
juice and table fruit; and soft- or hard-seeded. Hard-seeded
fruit possesses poor eating quality; soft-seeded fruit has
good eating quality; therefore soft-seeded cultivars are
preferred for table fruit and hard-seeded fruit is better for
processing. Furthermore, the desired pomegranate taste
varies and is country or region specific; for example,
in North Africa, nearly all the commercialized cultivars
are sweet types, while in many other countries, the sour
cultivars have been commercialized (Al-Kahtani, 1992).
The cultivars documented in the literature, by country, are
listed in Table 27.1; a brief description follows.
Figure 27.1. Pomegranate fruit and arils of different
types. For color detail, please see color plate section.
Recent clinical studies have postulated that pomegranate
has several beneficial health effects, including antioxidant
(Gil et al., 2000; Singh et al., 2002), antiviral (Zhang
et al., 1995), antibacterial (Prashanth et al., 2001), and
wound-healing effects (Murthy et al., 2002). Moreover,
pomegranate has been used to treat infectious (Holetz
et al., 2002), cardiovascular (Aviram et al., 2002) and oral
diseases (Vasconcelos et al., 2003), breast cancer (Mehta
and Lansky, 2004), prostate cancer (Lansky et al., 2005),
skin tumorigenesis (Hora et al., 2003; Afaq et al., 2005),
and colon carcinogenesis (Kohno et al., 2004; Sharma
et al., 2010).
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