2021 is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV), proclaimed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Dec 19, 2019. IYFV complements several initiatives towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, including the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025), the UN Decade of Family Farming (2019-2028) and World Health Organisation Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health.
The lockdown is a wake-up call to overcome challenges in local food production and agri-food chains, with an urgent need to improve infrastructure, farming practices and support for small-scale farmers, especially for highly perishable produce.
It is timelier than ever to raise awareness of the role of fruits and vegetables in human health when everyone is concerned about boosting immune systems.
The World Health Organisation recommends a minimum of 400gm of fruits and vegetables every day, yet most of us do not eat enough due to availability, affordability or lack of knowledge and awareness.
Low fruit consumption is among the leading dietary risk factors for deaths globally with more than 3.9 million deaths in 2017. Hence, WHO urges governments to promote healthy food through public health programmes.
Malaysia is blessed as a biodiversity hotspot with more than 370 native species of fruit-bearing trees, many of which grow in the wild. We are familiar with banana, papaya, pineapple, durian, mangosteen, rambutan, mango, watermelon, pitaya, guava, pomelo, starfruit, jackfruit, cempedak, and langsat, but ambarella, pulasan and salak are less common.
More uncommon are seashore mangosteen (beruas), plum mango (kundang), horse mango (bacang), rose apple (jambu mawar), Malay apple (jambu susu) and Indian jujube (epal siam).
Some fruits are native to Sabah and Sarawak, such as Borneo mango (bambangan), African black olive (dabai), and orange-fleshed durian (durian nyekak).
These underused fruits, rich in minerals and phytonutrients, represent hidden gems in our forests that contribute to the nutritious diets of indigenous people. They have a huge potential for further promotion in Malaysia and globally.
Trees contribute to more than 75 per cent of global carbon storage on agricultural land, despite only 43 per cent of land having more than 10 per cent tree cover. Furthermore, agro-forests have a higher floral, faunal and soil microbial diversity relative to mo-noculture farms.
Agroforests, or agro-parks, promote agricultural land restoration while playing an important role in hydrological cycles and groundwater recharge during rainfall to prevent soil degradation or landslide.
Fruit pricing is linked to consumer behaviour, demand, supply and socio-economic development as well as geopolitical factors. Monoculture increases the vulnerability of farmers to price fluctuation, climate change and pandemics. The drop in price of local banana exemplifies these scenarios when all farmers grew the same crop during the Movement Control Order last year.
Therefore, foster more productive, environmentally sustainable and resilient agricultural systems.
The upscaling of tropical fruit plantations should be diversified while avoiding deforestation for greater resource use efficiency and carbon sequestration capacity to conserve biodiversity and provide better diet quality.
Diversification of tropical fruit trees not only reduces poverty with extra income from cash crops, but also promotes domestic food security.
Agro-forests are suited for family farming. They can even become tourist attractions for urban escapades with guided farm tours and fruit buffets. A good success story would be the Penang fruit farm established in 1993 as the largest collection in Southeast Asia with more than 200 diverse edible fruit species.
Revitalisation of local tropical fruits will require concerted action from all stakeholders to provide affordable, accessible, safe, and appealing fruit products to all. The National Agro-Food Policy 2.0 (2021-2030) is much welcomed to support a transformational sustainable change in fruit agricultural systems and attracting young agropreneurs.
Local councils can identify underused agricultural land reserves or deforested or degraded land to be developed into agroforests or agro-parks with subsidies or micro-credit provision for urban farming. Other actions include facilitating market access by small-scale producers and incentivising agricultural enterprises with safety and quality assurance in supply chains.
Innovations should be encouraged to reduce losses and waste during post-harvest and transportation, decrease consumptions of natural resources or energy, and minimise ecological footprint of supply chains of fruits. Together we can revitalise Malaysia as a fruit paradise.
The writer is an associate professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia leading the Plant Functional Genomics Research Group at the Institute of Systems Biology
