Breadfruit, More Than Just Food!

Breadfruit (Kapiak) has a potential to become Papua New Guinea’s main source of food and cash crop in the coastal and islands region in terms of food security and scarcity due to climate change impacts.

The National Agricultural Research Institute(NARI) has embarked on a new project, Raising the profile of breadfruit in coastal and island food systems in PNG which will run for four(4) years 2024-2028.

To commence the project, NARI held a two-day Inception Workshop from the 20^th -21^st of August. The event was staged at the Momase Research Centre(MRC) in Lae, Morobe Province. The workshop was aimed to gauged views from selected breadfruit eating provinces on the varieties and traditional uses of the crop.

When officially opening the workshop, Director General of NARI, Dr. Nelson Simbiken emphasised the significance of the breadfruit project and the need to identify, conserve and introduce a wide range of breadfruit varieties into coastal and island farming systems to enhance local food security capabilities.

“It is less costly when we develop our own local crops instead of investing on foreign crops such as rice. We should focus on local crops that people already know how to cultivate as we already realised in the recent success of exporting taro to overseas and local markets” he said.

The Director General further stressed that the large bio-diversity of Papua New Guinea captures much of the plant genetic resources found region-wide. Hence, there is potential that new farming innovations developed here can be easily replicated in other Pacific island countries.

NARI currently have existing local germplasms collections of breadfruit at the Kerevat and Laloki research centres. However, this needs to expand to include other centres and farmers to have on-farm germplasms.

The institute recently had success with developing the commercial value of Galip Nut as an emerging cash crop. The Galip Nut experience would help in implementing the breadfruit project strategies.

All the provinces presented papers on the varieties of breadfruits and how people used breadfruits as food and the tree as wood for building houses and canoes. Gulf and New Ireland provinces were the highlights of the workshop. Gulf people depend on breadfruit as their traditional staple food and they also have an extra ordinary variety purple coloured flesh breadfruit while New Ireland people still do barter system,trading breadfruit from the mainland for fish from the islands.

The participants expressed willingness to work with NARI on the project. They referred to Breadfruit as a ‘Forgotten Tree Crop’ and it is high time prominence is given to the breadfruit as a source of food and income generating crop.

Recommendations from all papers presented wanted breadfruit to be promoted more and awareness given to the younger generation beginning in schools so today’s generation will appreciate breadfruit.

The Inception Workshop was also attended by NARI’s implementing partners, PNG Women in Agriculture Development Foundation(WiADF), Lutheran Development Services(LDS) who has established community networks will take the lead in Agrofrestry site management and the leading role in staging demonstration field days. NARI will also work in close collaboration with the University of Natural Resources and Environment(UNRE) who has the capacity to further research the Molecular Characterisation of Breadfruit Samples and is expected to provide expertise on DNA fingerprinting and data analysis. This will also provide an opportunity for Post Graduate and Masters in Science students to conduct research work as part of their industrial training work.

The four(4) year Breadfruit Project (2024-2028) is funded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation(FAO) through the International Treaty on Plant and Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture(ITPGRFA). It was officially closed by the Deputy Director General of NARI, Dr. Peter Gendua who thanked the participants and encouraged them to work closely with NARI to make the project a success.

The marketing slogan for the project is Breadfruit..More Than Just Food