Fruitful cooperation will deliver enhanced opportunities
The project title is a mouthful—Conservation and Sustainable Use of Cultivated and Wild Tropical Fruit Diversity: Promoting Sustainable Livelihoods, Food Security and Ecosystem Services—but it should deliver tasty results for farmers and conservation.
- Women play a central role in the conservation and marketing of diversity. Credit: Bhuwon Sthapit/Bioversity International
Signed in December 2008, Bioversity's newest project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) aims to help farmers to make use of selected tropical fruit trees to sustain their communities and by doing so to conserve the genetic diversity of those species and their wild relatives. The project is an outgrowth of a previous tropical fruit project funded by the Asian Development Bank (see 'Tropical fruit project grows to maturity,' IPGRI Annual Report 2002, p. 29).
The five-year project focuses on four tropical fruits (and their wild relatives) and four countries. The countries are India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and the four fruits are citrus (Citrus spp.), mango (Mangifera indica), mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana) and rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum). Each is highly diverse and economically important within one of the target countries, but no single country has the full range of genetic diversity of any of the target fruits. Efforts by any one of them would thus be fragmented in terms both of conserving and of using the diversity, but because partners in the four countries had positive experiences from the previous project they agreed to work together and thus to benefit from the resulting synergies. Each country has already identified project sites, which in total will involve some 36 communities.
The total project budget is US$10.3 million, with US$2.6 million coming from Bioversity, US$3.6 million from GEF and the rest largely from partners. The main driver for the project is that the four chosen fruits have historically formed important components of cultivated and natural ecosystems, but the cultivation of all four is now threatened to a greater or lesser extent. An additional benefit of the chosen species is that they contain important nutrients that can play a part in a healthy diet. The project will develop and implement appropriate conservation procedures for the target species and focus on the management and sustainable use of diversity by user groups. Ultimately, the aim is to establish a landscape-level community-based management model for safeguarding tropical fruit tree genetic resources, biological wealth and vital ecological functions over the long term.
"We will be adopting on-farm and in situ approaches to use and conservation," said Bhuwon Sthapit, the Bioversity scientist who coordinates the project.
Conservation using traditional ex situ approaches has proved to be only a partial solution, because it fails to address the loss of wild diversity and does not preserve the ecosystem conditions that are critical for the ongoing evolution of fruit tree diversity. "It also does not meet the needs of rural communities," says Sthapit. One approach he is eager to try will be to establish certification systems that can boost the market value of products that make use of tropical fruit diversity.
The project has been many years in planning and will now move forward into the first phase of implementation, as the several partners in the four countries start their work on the ground. The close cooperation among the partners—fostered during the Asian Development Bank project—augurs well for the wide applicability of the effort. "A regional, networked approach maximizes the variation that we can look at, ecosystem and genetic, and will let us learn lessons that have wider applicability than if we worked in one country with a limited set of species, ecosystems and political and economic systems," Sthapit pointed out.
Sthapit adds that there is a clear need to identify and implement good practices for the management of tropical fruit tree diversity that can contribute to reducing rural poverty. "That is why an important aspect of the project to accomplish this is to build the capacity of farmers and institutions to identify and apply the relevant good practices in their local contexts."
The project strategy is community-centred and emphasizes both local governance and participation; a key element is to study the decisions that local people make and the actions they take with the resources that they have. Sthapit stresses one particular aspect of these studies: "We really need to understand better the gender roles that characterize local management of natural resources. Women play a vital role in the use and conservation of all genetic diversity—including fruit trees—and it will be important to learn what they have to say."
Further information
Anticipated outcomes
Outcome 1: Diversity of tropical fruit tree genetic resources is conserved in situ and on-farm through improved knowledge of its value, use and sustainable management practices.
Outcome 2: Rural communities benefit by using methodologies and good practices for the management and conservation of tropical fruit tree species and intraspecific diversity.
Outcome 3: Stakeholders have the capacity and leadership skills to apply good practices for managing tropical fruit tree diversity for sustainable livelihoods, food security and ecosystem health.
