New hope for fruit growers
Besides being one of life's little pleasures, fruit is an essential source of nutrition. In the interests of promoting an abundance of fruit, the Germplasm Centre of the Bangladesh Agricultural University is constantly striving to develop new varieties suitable for local conditions. The hope is to offer the public more fruit all-year-round, by protecting endangered fruit varieties and introducing new types of fruit as well.
Recently, six new types of fruit have been introduced: santol from Thailand, lychee-like rambutan from Indonesia, dragonfruit from Vietnam, a type of malta from Vietnam, a persimmon species from Japan and avocados, originally native to southern Mexico.
Scientists at the Germplasm Centre hope both farmers and the public can benefit from commercial production in coming years, also with an eye on export potential. Already in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, fruit export is huge business; Bangladesh can also realise such potential.
According to the centre's director Prof Md Abdur Rahim, these new fruit varieties can also fill a gap in the domestic market, since they are harvested from May right through to November, covering later months when local fruit production is low.
“Most of our fruit, about 54 percent,” he says, “is harvested in the five months of the year around summer. From summer's end there is a crisis of fresh fruit in the marketplace which drives fruit prices upwards for consumers and adversely impacts the nutrition of ordinary Bangladeshis as a result.”
“If foreign, nutritional varieties are cultivated as well,” he continues, “fruit can be available to meet nutritional and customer demand year-round.”
The demand for foreign fruit varieties to be grown domestically, to ease pressure on demands for pricey imports, is also increasing, he adds, with conditions often proving suitable for cultivation.
The centre first collected four of these varieties: santol, rambutan, dragonfruit and persimmon, in 1999 and conducted research that reached the stage of sapling production in 2007. To date, the centre has produced 15,000 saplings of these four species, most of which have already been distributed to farmers through government and non-government organisations.
The dragonfruit has proved to be particularly popular with farmers in Chittagong and Mongla due to its ability to thrive in saline soils.
The Vietnamese malta, meanwhile, was released last year with the avocado soon to follow, centre officials said.
Worldwide, the Germplasm Centre in Mymensingh, which started with 74 fruit trees of 10 varieties in 1991, is currently the second largest fruit repository behind a similar institution in Miami, in the United States. As a result, international scientists of repute from home and abroad often visit, as do more and more regular people, curious to know about the centre's activities.
The centre, which now features more than 14,500 fruit trees of 851 varieties including 58 foreign varieties from 44 countries, is also working to save 63 domestic fruit varieties threatened with extinction, including boichi, dumur, dewa, paniwala, betul, gab, chalta and arboroi. Since 2007, it has also trained some 12,000 farmers in various districts on cultivation of domestic and international varieties.
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