By Claudia Geib. Originally published on Mongabay under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence.
When the sugary-sweet masuku plum is in season in Malawi, locals go wild over it. “They will eat it while traveling, in the bath, on the streets … they just eat,” said Richard Swirah, an agroecologist with the Malawi chapter of the organization WeForest.
Swirah has seen firsthand that native fruits like the masuku (Uapaca kirkiana) are in high demand in local markets — ”they sell like hot cakes,” he told Mongabay during a Zoom interview — but the supply is incredibly scarce. Owing to high levels of deforestation, native food-bearing trees such as the Masuku are becoming increasingly rare in Malawi and across East Africa.
Recent work hopes to reverse this trend. Swirah is one of 40 people who participated in workshops earlier this year to share knowledge and questions about the use of Indigenous food trees in landscape restoration work, an area where they have so far been underutilized. Organized by University of Copenhagen postdoctoral fellow Emilie Vansant, the workshops identified the main challenges to integrating Indigenous food trees into the East African landscape, where tree-planting initiatives often focus on fast-growing, non-native timber species. These findings are summarized in a paper published in June.
“Something important to highlight is that this work is not advocating for all introduced or all Indigenous trees, but for an integration — broadening the scope a bit to include these Indigenous tree species, because of their benefits for diets and biodiversity,” Vansant told Mongabay over Zoom.
Vansant’s interest in Indigenous food trees came from her Ph.D. work, in which she surveyed households in Malawi to find out how forests and backyard trees influenced people’s diets. She found that women who were supplementing their diets with food from these trees had higher levels of important nutrients, such as folate, zinc and vitamin A. She also knew these same trees promoted better conditions for diverse native plants and animals.
These findings sparked a realization for Vansant: Planting more of these trees might be a solution for both chronic malnutrition and biodiversity loss from deforestation.
But Vansant said that when she and her team spoke with farmers, they said they lacked information on how to plant more native trees; indeed, the only resource she could find was a tree-planting guide for Africa as a whole, published in 1993 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO).
In response, after concluding her Ph.D., Vansant worked with collaborators from Copenhagen and Malawi, including Malawian foresters, botanists and agroecologists, to create an illustrated guide to planting, caring for and collecting seeds from edible tree species native to East Africa. The vast majority of these are fruit trees like the masuku plum, though many have multiple edible or medicinal products, such as the African custard-apple (Annona senegalensis), which bears edible fruit, flowers that can be used as a spice and leaves that can be cooked like a vegetable. Another species included was the marula (Sclerocarya birrea) which has high-protein seeds inside its edible fruits that can be ground into flour or pressed into oil.
Vansant’s team presented this guide in the two workshops, using it as a jumping-off point for discussions about what practitioners needed to make better use of these trees.
Vansant was unsurprised to find that the link between public health and ecological health, which she said are usually separated fields of study in Europe and the U.S., was apparent to Malawians.
“When I did my PhD research, visiting households and doing these dietary surveys, I was just blown away by the amount of species I had never heard of, but also the uses that farmers had for each species,” she said. “These farmers had an intimate knowledge of their direct environment, but also this intersection between ecological health and human health. It’s a given: that’s something they didn’t have to buy into.”
Challenges to growing Indigenous food trees
The workshops also identified three areas that practitioners agreed lacked resources, creating an obstacle to using these trees in their work. One of the biggest challenges came with simply helping these trees survive: Their seeds tend to have a very narrow window of time during which they’re viable and the trees themselves only survive in a limited set of environmental conditions. The new tree-planting guide serves as a start, but practitioners are still lacking much species-specific information, Vansant said.
Additionally, the practitioners shared that there are few commercial outlets where they can sell the products of these native trees, which lowers their financial value compared to more marketable products such as non-native timber. This last factor is an important one for many farmers. Indigenous trees’ specific needs and the fact that they grow much slower make them more risky than commercial species bred for hardiness and productivity.
“I don’t see people saying no to Indigenous food trees on principle, but when time and money is involved, that’s a major challenge,” Vansant said. “Creating market opportunities is one way to address the longer time and labor prospects associated with these species.”
Community-controlled income
Experts caution that these market opportunities should be created carefully, however. Nils McCune, an agroecology researcher at the University of Vermont not involved with Vansant’s study, has worked with community-based agroecology projects all over the world.
Two projects he has worked with were in Ghana and included processing facilities for locally grown baobab (Adansonia digitata), a native fruit that has recently grown in popularity around the world. The facilities have been successful in creating valuable products from every part of the baobab, but most importantly, McCune said, the entire process is managed by the community. The money generated returns to that community as profit for farmers, salaries for working in the processing facility and access to credit and loans.
“The idea of generating an economic surplus, or generating an income stream, should somehow be tied to community control,” McCune told Mongabay over a Zoom call. This helps guard against outside interests which can warp well-meaning initiatives into focusing on only the final product, rather than the community — plant, animal and human — that it supports, he said: “Most economic textbooks only see one product looking at a coffee farm, for example, not the migratory birds and insects and other stuff that rely on it.”
Vansant said most communities in Malawi aren’t yet at the level of figuring out this structure, though she has heard of promising first steps taken by workshop participants already. One government botanist and forester let her know that he had been using the tree-planting guide to hold workshops on how to collect, process and store Indigenous seeds. Josie Redmonds, a workshop participant who runs the community nonprofit ButterflySpace, has been integrating the trees from the guide into tree-mapping lessons for local teachers, so that children in Malawi will grow up knowing their native species.
At WeForest, one of Swirah’s priorities is reforesting areas that have been cleared, which includes establishing agroforestry patches alongside fast-growing trees. Swirah and his team were working to integrate more Indigenous species before the workshops, including training local communities on how to collect and save local seeds. The tree-planting guide created by Vansant’s team has provided his team with resources to tailor their techniques to better fit different species. Since the workshop, he’s also been focused on how WeForest can use these trees to create opportunities for the communities it works with.
“What I am really looking for is funds to put much more effort into this, and upscale the promotion of indigenous trees on a larger scale, so that the communities can be self-reliant and benefit from the sales of these fruit trees,” Swirah said. Already, he sees opportunities in selling native fruits to local wineries and breweries and is keenly aware that the time to act for the environment and local communities is now.
“If we can start doing this now, we can do much more now from where we are,” he said. “We will not stop: it is in my heart to be promoted.”
Citations:
Vansant, E., Den Braber, B., Hall, C., Kamoto, J., Lupafya, E., McMullin, S., … Rasmussen, L. V. (2026). Restoring Indigenous trees can help combat malnutrition in Africa. PNAS Nexus, 5(6). doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag156