Hidden inside the pulp of a gigantic amber fruit are seeds that could significantly improve the lives of African farmers. The Allanblackia tree, which produces up to 300 fruit a year, is commonly found in the continent’s rainforests. Used for centuries as a source of cooking oil, medicine and timber, harvesters rise early in the morning to collect the crop, extract the seeds and lay them out to dry in the sun.
Due to limited income sources, many residents of the rural areas where the tree thrives are living well below the poverty line, but this economic hardship could be remedied if industry realises this underexploited fruit’s potential.
Botany enthusiast Denzil Phillips of Denzil Phillips International is hoping he can get more businesses to take notice of the Allanblackia tree, which first attracted interest outside equatorial Africa over a decade ago. For 30 years he’s been sourcing and implementing quality control for medicinal, aromatic and cosmetic plants all over the world. Africa, though, has always been a challenging area.
“Other than the Amazon, Africa has more biodiversity than anywhere else in the world,” he explains. “Yet the number of plants that are commercialised is very small. It’s a huge, untapped resource area.”
Unleashing potential
Identifying new crops and attempting to remove the bottlenecks preventing them getting to market is Phillips’ speciality. He believes plants like Allanblackia have great potential and present exciting opportunities for local people, once supply-chain hurdles have been ironed out.
White Allanblackia oil, obtained by crushing the tree’s dried kernels, has unique properties, which could be of great interest to the food and cosmetics sectors. Allanblackia oil belongs to a category called non-timber forest products, where trees don’t have to be chopped down to source the goods. Such crops provide extra money for farmers in dry seasons, when they’re not cultivating traditional food crops such as cocoa, and are one of the few resources to give women in the region a direct income.
Allanblackia first gained industry awareness in a Ghanaian factory, where Lever Brothers (a subsidiary of Unilever) produces an inexpensive soap from low-grade palm oil for local markets. In 2000, as demands for domestic soap increased, the company began to search for locally obtained alternative oils. One of these turned out to be the white vegetable fat extracted from the tree’s seeds.
An aliquot of the oil was sent to the Netherlands for analysis, and it was there the company discovered its special properties. Not only is the substance very low in saturated fats – consisting almost entirely of stearic and oleic acids – it also has a sharp melting point, at 34°C. This means the substance remains solid at room temperature, but melts in the mouth – perfect for a cream-based spread like margarine. This property and its white colour render further chemical modifications unnecessary, thus simplifying the manufacturing process, and representing a more environmental alternative to the controversial palm oil. This could have uses in the production of many foods but is of particular interest to the chocolate-making industry.
Aside from foodstuffs, Phillips thinks the substance will do well in the cosmetic sector as a replacement for shea butter – an ivory-coloured fat extracted from the shea nut – which is widely used as a moisturiser.
Novella Project
To meet future requirements, significant investment needs to be injected into the Allanblackia supply chain. In 2002, the Novella Project was introduced by Unilever – along with a large number of international and regional partners – to promote the sustainable harvesting of the crop, and create the organisations and infrastructure necessary to scale up production in Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria.
“They started to encourage farmers to harvest the seeds, and said they’d buy them all,” explains Phillips.
But it wasn’t as easy as big business had anticipated.
“The big question is, why hasn’t it taken off?” asks Phillips. “I think it’s because the supply base hasn’t developed as wanted.”
At Novella’s conception stage, surveys were conducted predicting a huge yield of the crop, but 2004’s first commercial harvest in Tanzania was disappointing. A paltry 4t were collected, a tenth of the amount predicted. It’s thought this was partly due to the villagers not being convinced they would see a return on the extra work. But it also turned out that Allanblackia isn’t as easy to cultivate as the inventories had suggested. The plan was to create large numbers of trees by planting more seeds, but after one year, less than 1% had germinated.
Additionally, it was discovered the trees can take 12-15 years to begin fruiting – the plant’s peculiar science was trying everyone’s patience.
It was clear there was no way wild harvesting would meet market demands. Allanblackia would instead have to be brought out of the forests and onto farmer’s fields. And so, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) was enlisted to join the project, thanks to its extensive experience of domesticating wild African fruit trees.
ICRAF initially focused on working out how get Allanblackia seeds to germinate quickly. Several methods were tried – some particularly disastrous, including the introduction of a growth hormone that killed an entire batch of 80,000 seeds. But after much trial and error, and with the assistance of local knowledge, better techniques were determined; for example, local people suggested removing the seeds’ hard coats with a knife and placing them in black bags to encourage growth.
But even successful seed propagation has its disadvantages for such a project. One major issue is that it’s impossible to determine the sex of Allanblackia seeds. A dioecious species, each particular tree is either male or female. Farmers must wait ten years to determine a plant’s sex, signalled by white (female) or orange (male) flowers. And only a female tree will bear fruit.
Vegetative propagation was thus sought. ICRAF and villagers were able to capture Allanblackia’s most desirable traits by using cuttings from the best wild trees. By 2008, superior seedlings were planted, with farmers paid $0.15 for every sapling that survived the first year.
Encouraging success
There have been further triumphs since then. Unilever says the scheme has so far generated extra income for approximately 11,000 farmers.
“One of the most successful farms in Tanzania is now a member of the Union for Ethical Biotrade,” says Phillips. “The company was the first to sell its Allanblackia products for food purposes and cosmetics.”
But he thinks there’s still a long way to go, and is working to encourage more investment and interest from the farmers to integrate Allanblackia production into their existing agriculture systems.
“Getting African farmers to go into agroforestry has never been very successful,” he says. “It’s partly because of landholding, because most land is commonly owned.”
As agroforestry usually requires either the agreement of the villages to lend land for this type of use, it often results in disputes. Phillips also thinks African governments should look more closely at their vegetable-oil needs and whether the amount imported is necessary for a region that could easily have a cheap, local supply.
“There are still many imports going on when they should be spending effort, time and money on developing their own local vegetable oil,” he says. “Nigeria, for example, imports huge quantities, but if it put even a small amount of money into developing its Allanblackia production, you could see major changes.”
He knows that’s only the half the story, though. This sort of venture requires the big industry players to stay interested and keep investing. As yet, there’s no commercial product on the market with a particular brand and he thinks that’s what has to come.
“The project needs money,” says Phillips. “Unilever thinks very long term and it’s unlikely it’ll give up. But I don’t think it is investing in plantations. The company is trying to find partners to do that, and I don’t think it has been as successful as it’d like.”
Phillips is also aware of the politics surrounding fats and oils. It’s not easy for a new player to make an appearance. But he believes Allanblackia oil has a lot of potential and wants more ingredients professionals to be privy to its attractive properties.
“To change someone’s formula for margarine and introduce a new product is difficult,” he says. “At the moment Allanblackia is something worth looking at. Keep an eye out for it if you’re in the formulation sector.”
