World Agroforestry Centre - Transforming Lives and Landscapes

Fruits for a Better Future

The World Agroforestry Centre is playing a leading role in the domestication of indigenous fruit trees, a process that has the potential to improve the welfare of millions of smallholder farmers. The research is already helping to increase incomes, improve nutrition and enhance biodiversity.

If you’d come here 10 years ago, says Thaddeus Salah, a smallholder in north-west Cameroon, you’d have seen real poverty. “In those times,” he says, “we didn’t have enough to eat.” But it wasn’t just food that his family lacked. They couldn’t afford school fees, healthcare and many other things. Thaddeus’s fortunes began to change in 2000 when he learnt how to identify the best indigenous fruit trees in the wild, and the techniques to propagate them in a nursery. “Domesticating wild fruit trees has changed our lives,” he says. He now earns five times more than he did in the past and he’s been able to pay school fees and renovate his house.

Thaddeus is one of many farmers in West Africa who have benefited from the participatory domestication programmes launched by the World Agroforestry Centre in 1998. This ongoing programme involves communities in the selection, propagation and management of high-value indigenous fruit trees. In 1998, there were just two farmer-run nurseries. There are now several hundred. Many of these nurseries have been supported by a small network of ‘rural resource centres’. Besides establishing nurseries and demonstration plots, the centres have provided training for thousands of farmers like Thaddeus in a range of agroforestry practices. (See story pages 21 to 23).

Seeds of hope
Partnership – and farmers’ participation – has been at the heart of a programme to domesticate Allanblackia, an indigenous African tree whose seeds contain an oil with properties that make it highly attractive to companies manufacturing food spreads such as margarine.

The benefits of the emerging trade in Allanblackia oil, derived so far from harvesting in the wild, are already being felt by some 10,000 smallholder farmers. “With the money I’ve made,” explains Wallace Kimweri, a farmer in Tanzania’s East Usambara Mountains, “I’ve been able to buy things I could never afford before.” Last year he bought a cow for 160,000 shillings (USD 120). The profits from Allanblackia have also paid for iron sheets to re-roof his house and his childrens’ school fees.

But there’s a problem: there aren’t nearly enough trees to satisfy demand. The solution lies in turning Allanblackia into a crop that can be planted on farmers’ fields, and its domestication is one of the key activities of the Novella Project, a public-private partnership involving the World Agroforestry Centre, Unilever, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV).

“Within 10 years, we’re hoping African farmers will be growing 25 million Allanblackia trees,” explains Tony Simons, Deputy Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre. The project aims to double the income of those involved with Allanblackia cultivation by 2017.

“This project is putting an end to the idea that you can’t measure carbon beyond large blocks of forests.”
Jonathon Hasket

In 1998, there were two farmers’ nurseries in Cameroon. There are now over 300. “Over 10,000 smallholder farmers in Africa are benefiting from the trade in Allanblackia oil. Before long, millions could be.”

The Science of Success

“As a general principle, it is important to maintain genetic variation in the trees farmers plant,” explains Ian Dawson, a Research Fellow with the World Agroforestry Centre. “With many species of fruit trees, for example, different ‘genotypes’ need to cross with each other if they are to produce fruit.”

Measuring fruit size, colour, taste and so on enables researchers and farmers to understand the variation in important traits, but these observations describe only a small portion of the underlying genetic diversity in trees. However, by using biotechnology, and particularly molecular markers, the genetic diversity of a species can be revealed in full.

Molecular markers provide detailed information about how genetic diversity is structured within and among different stands of trees. “They are like lamp posts on the genome,” explains World Agroforestry Centre scientist Ramni Jamnadass, “and if we use them wisely they can help us to safeguard useful genetic variation within species.”

Molecular markers could prove particularly useful for tree-crop domestication programmes. In Cameroon, for example, their use enables scientists to establish the degree of variation within the populations which are currently being cloned for planting in farmers’ fields.

“We need to do this to ensure that farmers plant a genetically diverse range of trees,” explains Zac choundjeu, Regional Coordinator for West and Central Africa. “If we don’t, then inbreeding is likely to lead to lower productivity, and a lack of genetic variation could also make the trees more prone to diseases and other problems.”