Indigenous Fruit Trees of Tropical Africa: Status, Opportunity for Development and Biodiversity Management

Abstract

Tropical fruit trees constitute important biological resources in the global agrobiodiversity con-text. Unlike the tropical fruit trees of American and Asian origin, indigenous fruit trees (IFT) of tropical Africa have scarcely achieved the status of international recognition in commodity mar-kets and research arena outside Africa. This paper presented a critical review of the status of IFT in the Tropical African sub-regions (of West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands) in relation to the introduced naturalised fruit trees from tropical Amer-ica and Asia, threats to the diversity and sustainable use of IFT, analysis of the opportunities and challenges of developing IFT, as well as targets for crop improvement of the rich IFT of Tropical Africa. Domestication programme via relevant vegetative propagation techniques for priority IFT of the sub-regions was examined and advocated, in addition to the adoption of complementary conservation strategies, including Field GeneBanks in the management of the continent's IFT di-versity.