workshops rated high-value oil and wine products lower than low-value juice and jam products. Community processors are aware of the value of oil and wine products but they do not have access to the skills and technology required to process them. It also seems that people are more familiar with the technologies required to process exotic fruit products than indigenous fruits.
The overall product rating for Malawi indicated that mango products were the most preferred. Only one indigenous product, Uapaca juice, was rated amongst the top five products from Malawi. In the Tabora workshop, Syzygium juice was rated as the overall most preferred product along with two other indigenous products, Strychnos juice and Vitex jam, amongst the top five products. The Zimbabwe group rated the high-value oil products highest, followed by Ziziphusfruit leather (puréed then dried) and marula jelly.
There were some differences between the ‘spontaneous’ preferences of participants (Table 1.11) and the overall rankings from the assessment of products on ecological, socio-economic, market and technical aspects (Tables 1.12–1.14). In the Tanzania workshop, baobab juice dropped from first place in the spontaneous ranking to ninth in the more detailed assessment, performing poorly on all four criteria. In contrast, guava jam rose from tenth to second, performing particularly well on socio-economic and technical criteria. In the Zimbabwe workshop, Ziziphusfruit leather rose from fifth to first and Strychnos jelly fell from second to sixth. In Malawi, there was little difference between the rankings in the two exercises.
among them. It also proved useful for improving linkages between institutions involved in the process and for building a spirit of partnership. These contributed to rapid progress in germplasm collection and propagation studies, involving many of the same people who participated in the prioritization exercises. Through the process of setting priorities, the teams conducting domestication research gained sound evidence for defending their choice of species on which to conduct research. This contributed to greater motivation among team members, stronger linkages with policy makers, and greater confidence among donor agencies that domestication research would yield fruitful results.
1.4.2 Methods for setting priorities
The main method used in the priority-setting exercise – the survey of farmer preferences among species – proved to be popular among participants in the exercise as a means of justifying the choice of species to conduct domestication research on. In contrast, the valuation survey was only conducted in one region, the humid lowlands of West Africa, where it yielded the same rankings as those from the survey of farmer preferences. Researchers in the Sahel and southern Africa thus decided it was not worth the cost of conducting such a survey in their own regions. In fact, while the surveys do give useful information on values of production, it is probable that in most instances these values will reflect the rankings obtained in preference surveys.
One weakness of the priority-setting exercise was that it did not explicitly assess the market potential of different species and products. Survey respondents could not be expected to be aware of marketing opportunities, especially international opportunities, and nor could researchers. In fact, many of the species that have been added to lists of priority species following the priority-setting exercise have been added because of market opportunities. In the humid lowlands of West Africa, for example, Prunus africana was added because an extract of its bark could be sold for export to Europe, where it is used in medicines for treating benign prostatic hypertrophy, a common disease in men (Cunningham et al., 2002). The assessment of priority products to commercialize in southern Africa, as discussed above, was important and added new species, albeit exotics that had been excluded from the original surveys. It also highlighted the differences that exist between different locations in a region and between rural processors and urban ones, especially when priority setting is based on product preferences (Ham, 2004). Such an exercise should be part of all priority-setting procedures. In addition, formal assessments of market opportunities could be added to the exercise, and the results of these could be shared with stakeholders, who should ultimately decide whether new species and products should be targeted.
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2 Towards a Domestication Strategy for Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics
R.R.B. L
EAKEY1ANDF.K. A
KINNIFESI21Agroforestry and Novel Crops Unit, School of Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland, Australia;
2World Agroforestry Centre, ICRAF, Lilongwe, Malawi