I fully support the overall vision in his article but I don't know where Charlie Pye-Smith got his English names from? As the fruit of the Uapaca spp which are abundant in Mashonaland, Zimbabwe would never be described as "Sugar Plums" they have phenolics in them and are a tart tasting fruit. In contrast, the Marula fruit at its best could not be described "tart-turpentine flavoured"? I am surprised he didn't include some Southern African experts in his research - the Univ of Pretoria has been improving the marula for years for example.
This sounds remarkably like the story of a range of fruit and nuts found in Australia, especially the tropical north, and I've seen some really obscure fruits in parts of Indonesia that should probably be researched as well.
Good point Ray. There has been a similar process happening in Australia over the last 30 years with under-utilized native food plants. Horticulturists started researching which species could be commerically developed in the late 1970s, and by the mid 80s products were going into up-market city restaurants, and now products are being exported. Aboriginal communities are involved in production and are increasingly getting more involved in value-adding amd marketing.
What the Australian experience indicates is that it's the strong flavoured fruits and spices that have the most commercial potential in value-added products...and interestingly it's not sweet fruits that are important. Nutraceutical qualities - like antioxidants - also count for lot when it comes to market penetration for a new food crop. Ideally the new food needs to have a unique flavour or quality that existing products don't have.
surely people cant share knowledge and plants - the only way for agriculture to work is for a few large companies to make a few farmers grow imported crops at extortionate prices!
But seriously, people have been laughed at recently for suggesting growing indigenous species in natural ways - Forest gardening appears to be what's happening there.
Its a great idea - though I am concerned that 'improving' crops will have a detrimental effect on the overall production.
I had the pleasure of growing up in Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s.
Living and schooling in remote regions exposed me to wild fruits that I will probably never see or taste again.
Part of me would like to see these fruits harvested more to generate an income for the local economies.
However, having seen the damage intensive farming can do to the local ecology I have my reservations.
There is also the not so small matter of the condition of the fruits by the time they reach European shores. I am constantly disappointed by the Bananas, Mango, Pawpaws, Watermelons and other exotic fruits that come to the UK. They are always picked so early that they never have a chance to properly ripen and frankly taste very poor.
And don't get me started on the long term nitrogen storage that citrus fruits endure. The result is often a fruit that is simply not worth eating.
The supply and storage of fruit (and veg) to keep it in excellent condition needs to be sorted.
I'd rather not see these products on our shelves if the we are only going to get them in poor condition.
Don't forget that most people don't know how the imported fruit is supposed to taste. While you might dislike imported bananas and watermelons, many others think they taste fine ... because they don't know any better.
Those are good points, Matt. For these fruits to become viable in western markets, some research will have to be done. Shelf life, how long the flavor lasts, bruise resistance during transport, ripening characteristics, etc. have to be optimized. The nutritional profile of these foods should be investigated to see how they would fit into a balanced diet. And more advanced food science should be applied, for example to see if they can become ingredients in ice creams, yogurt, or other prepared foods, or candy substitutes. Or transformed somehow into a derivative product: for example when grains were converted to whiskey in early America, the product became more transportable, had more uses and a longer shelf life and became more economically valuable. Those markets are huge.
This sounds like high-level science and marketing outside the realm of smallholder farmers, but they could sell as much as they can grow if some of these fruits enter the western diet and make it big. It will be up to economists and policymakers, and unfortunately indigenous africans and their corrupt politicians, to nurture these developments so that the local farmers benefit. For good or bad, it may turn out that large plantations will be the best model; after all they are very efficient. The west used to have many small farmers too but agricultural advances and economic reality made bigger farms more realistic. That worked in parallel with social change, which Africa will not be immune to. .
Another possibility is that some of these crops could be adapted to grow in western lands. Drought-tolerant crops especially would be a boon for use in semi-arid areas.
And some people will freak out at this, but using genetic modification techniques could capture the desirable genes of these crops and create even better plants with desirable nutritional, taste and medicinal properties. But if they are perennial trees and not annuals, propagation would still be easy for amateurs using grafting and such. That will make a patented monopoly for a biotech company very difficult to maintain (although they do it with fruit trees), which may mean that type of agricultural advance will not take place, either, if it's not feasible to profit from it. That's something to think about.
I want to taste the chocolate berries and strawberry apples.
The recent development of new native crops from Australia show that unique foods that can be put into long-shelf life, value-added products are more likely to be commercially successful than fresh food products.
And anyone investigating these potential new crops needs to have that firmly in mind or else they will overlook the commercial potential.
For example, look at garlic. If you had never eaten garlic before and you were given a clove of garlic to eat raw, you would most likely think it was disgusting. However, put into a sumptuous pizza it would not take long to appreciate its culinary virtues.
The culinary perspective is probably more important than anything else in new crop development!
So, it's not so much about genetic manipulation of wild food crops to create something like what we already have - it's more about understanding the unique culinary and nutritional potential of a given wild food - especially in a processed food product ...or a gourmet dish in an up-market restaurant.
Are these the same as medlars which grow in Europe? People grew these in medieval times, but in today's woods they are no bigger than rose hips, and you have to wait for them to rot before they are edible. Imagine my surprise when I saw some in a public park the size of pears! And they tasted good too...
The articles is all-out positive about future prospects, but the comments make a grim and cynical read. Perhaps the best hope for African farmers is that most of the newly cultivated fruit trees won't "make it big" in Western supermarkets and they won't have to compete with ultra-efficient mass-producing. After all, small-scale production of fruit is a niche where some individual farmers still manage to eke out a living even in the industrialized West.
Whats happening there is great - it should happen in the 'wets' before its too late. The forest gardening approach is far more productive than GM and tractors can ever hope to be. We need to grow what the land grows best and utilise that - not force our own 'market research' on it.
Carp can be grown very easily in simple ponds and provide around a ton of protein per acre per year in the UK with hardly any inputs. Because anyone could do it it wasn't profitable - now we have the same land used to grow perhaps 100Kg of beef a year with huge inputs and it makes more money.
The market makes a few people rich - it will never help feed the world.
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