Bhitoni harvests fallen baobab fruit. — Photos: AARON UFUMELI/AP
SINCE childhood, Loveness Bhitoni has collected fruit from the gigantic baobab trees surrounding her homestead in Zimbabwe to add variety to the family’s staple corn and millet diet. The 50-year-old Bhitoni never saw them as a source of cash, until now.
Climate change-induced droughts have decimated her crops. Meanwhile, the world has a growing appetite for the fruit of the drought-resistant baobab as a natural health food.
Bhitoni wakes before dawn to go foraging for baobab fruit, walking barefoot though hot, thorny landscapes with the risk of wildlife attacks. She gathers sacks of the hard-shelled fruit from the ancient trees and sells them on to industrial food processors or individual buyers from the city.
The baobab trade, which took root in her area in 2018, would previously supplement things like children’s school fees and clothing for locals of the small town of Kotwa in northeastern Zimbabwe.
Now, it’s a matter of survival following the latest devastating drought in southern Africa worsened by the El Nino weather phenomenon.
“We are only able to buy corn and salt,” Bhitoni said after a long day’s harvest. “Cooking oil is a luxury, because the money is simply not enough. Sometimes I spend a month without buying a bar of soap. I can’t even talk of school fees or children’s clothes.”
The global market for baobab products has spiked, turning rural African areas with an abundance of the trees into source markets. The trees, known for surviving even under severe conditions like drought or fire, need more than 20 years to start producing fruit and aren’t cultivated but foraged.
Tens of thousands of rural people like Bhitoni have emerged to feed the need. The African Baobab Alliance, with members across the continent’s baobab producing countries, projects that more than one million rural African women could reap economic benefits from the fruit, which remains fresh for long periods because of its thick shell.
The alliance’s members train locals on food safety. They also encourage people to collect the fruit, which can grow to 8 inches (20cm) wide and 21 inches (53cm) long, from the ground rather than the hazardous work of climbing the enormous, thick-trunked tree. Many, especially men, still do though.
Bhitoni is among tens of thousands of rural Africans in the baobab trade.
‘Tree of life’
Native to the African continent, the baobab is known as the “tree of life” for its resilience and is found from South Africa to Kenya to Sudan and Senegal. Zimbabwe has about five million of the trees, according to Zimtrade, a government export agency.
But the baobab’s health benefits long went unnoticed elsewhere.
Gus Le Breton, a pioneer of the industry, remembers the early days.
“Baobab did not develop into a globally traded and known superfood by accident,” said Le Breton, recalling years of regulatory, safety and toxicology testing to convince authorities in the European Union and United States to approve it.
“It was ridiculous because the baobab fruit has been consumed in Africa safely for thousands and thousands of years,” said Le Breton, an ethnobotanist specialising in African plants used for food and medicine.
The US legalised the import of baobab powder as a food and beverage ingredient in 2009, a year after the EU. But getting foreign taste buds to accept the new tang took repeated trips to Western and Asian countries.
“No one had ever heard of it, they didn’t know how to pronounce its name. It took us a long time,” Le Breton said. The tree is pronounced bay-uh-bab.
Together with China, the US and Europe now account for baobab powder’s biggest markets. The Dutch government’s Centre for the Promotion of Imports says the global market could reach US$10bil (RM43bil) by 2027. Le Breton says his association projects a 200% growth in global demand between 2025 and 2030, and is also looking at increasing consumption among Africa’s increasingly health-conscious urbanites.
Food companies have also opened product lines promoting baobab ingredients. In Europe, the powder is hyped by some as having “real star qualities” and is used to flavour beverages, cereals, yoghurt, snack bars and other items.
A 1kg packet of baobab powder sells for around €27 (RM127) in Germany. In the United Kingdom, a 100ml bottle of baobab beauty oil can fetch £25 (about RM140).
A worker throws shells of baobab fruits into a furnace at a factory.
Growing industry
The growing industry is on display at a processing plant in Zimbabwe, where baobab pulp is bagged separately from the seeds. Each bag has a tag tracing it to the harvester who sold it. Outside the factory, the hard shells are turned into biochar, an ash given to farmers for free to make organic compost.
Harvesters like Bhitoni say they can only dream of affording the commercial products the fruit becomes. She earns 17 cents (RM0.72) for 1kg of the fruit and she can spend up to eight hours a day walking through the sunbaked savannah. She has exhausted the trees nearby.
“The fruit is in demand, but the trees did not produce much this year, so sometimes I return without filling up a single sack,” Bhitoni said. “I need five sacks to get enough money to buy a 10kg packet of cornmeal.”
Some individual buyers who feed a growing market for the powder in Zimbabwe’s urban areas prey on residents’ drought-induced hunger, offering cornmeal in exchange for seven 20-litre buckets of cracked fruit, she said.
“People have no choice because they have nothing,” said Kingstone Shero, the local councillor. “The buyers are imposing prices on us and we don’t have the capacity to resist because of hunger.”
Le Breton sees better prices ahead as the market expands.
“I think that the market has grown significantly, (but) I don’t think it has grown exponentially. It’s been fairly steady growth,” he said. “I believe at some point that it will increase in value as well. And at that point, then I think that the harvesters will really start to be earning some serious income from the harvesting and sale of this really truly remarkable fruit,” he said.
Zimtrade, the government export agency, has lamented the low prices paid to baobab pickers and says it’s looking at partnering with rural women to set up processing plants. The difficult situation is likely to continue due to a lack of negotiating power by fruit pickers, some of them children, said Prosper Chitambara, a development economist based in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.On a recent day, Bhitoni walked from one baobab tree to the next. She carefully examined each fruit before leaving the smaller ones for wild animals such as baboons and elephants to eat – an age-old tradition.
“It is tough work, but the buyers don’t even understand this when we ask them to increase prices,” she said. – AP
