TimothyThe new fruit juice extraction plant in Mutare set up under the aegis of Mutare Teachers College and commissioned last week by President Mnangagwa is the sort of industry that we should be looking at more and more.
While some of the fruit grown in Manicaland and being processed at the plant will produce juices that are not unique to Zimbabwe, the plant will also be looking at local fruit, in particular baobab fruit where there is no chance of following an import substitution model, but rather creating a new product that no one else is making.
You cannot, for example, stroll into a Zimbabwean supermarket, or for that matter a Johannesburg or New York supermarket, and buy a bottle of baobab juice. Of course people in African villages have been using the fruit to make drinks for thousands of years, and others make these at home and you can even find recipes on the internet. But you cannot, until now, buy it in a bottle.
This is why it is so important for our new industries to be looking at new products, rather than being happy to continue with just import substitutions. These are still worthwhile, but the real value comes from figuring out products that can compete within the African Continental Free Trade Area, and further afield.
Import substation will work when we produce a quality product that can compete on price and quality with the product from another African state that it is substituting for, so we should be investigating new brands of established products, and seeing if these are viable in a continental market.
But the real gains will come when we set up the first brand, and open the market. Others will follow, of course, but so long as we retain a high quality product it will be the leader in the markets, and being number one has a lot of advantages.
The Mutare plant follows the lead of the Rutenga juice plant that processes another local tree, the mapfura/marula which abounds in the surrounding area and provides the raw fruit that the plant uses. It also provides an extra stream of income for many farming families in the district during the harvest by providing a market.
Again this is an indigenous tree, that has been used by local people for thousands of years, and where there is a lot known, but not much on the commercial side, just buckets of fruit sold on the side of the road or by pavement vendors. You see buckets of fruit being offloaded from buses in the season, which is fine but there are now new products and refined products coming onto the market.
There have been some extra gains. People around Rutenga no longer see a marula tree as potential firewood, or in the way. The trees are now valuable commercially and protected the easiest way, by ensuring that their value benefits the communities who live with the trees.
Baobabs have never really been attacked by local people, because of the benefits and the sheer size, as well as the type of wood, but are not really planted deliberately. If there is expanding commercial use of the fruit now seems to be a good time to look at planting. They take time to mature, although they live for over 1000 years, with Zimbabwe actually recording the record longest-lived tree of 2 450 years when it died.
While some research has been done on marula and baobab trees we doubt if anyone has been looking hard enough at potential varieties, and checking up on which trees produce the tastiest fruit or the most fruit and using seeds from those trees to start semi domestication. There seems to be some very practical research potential for some botany graduate.
There is need in any case for more baobab research with the recent die-offs of the oldest and largest trees in Southern Africa. The cause has yet to be established although dehydration is the most likely reason. This would mean that plantings might have to be in new areas. Climate change may present extra threats but there is enough range of conditions in Zimbabwe to find the best sites.
There is a lot of scope for a lot more indigenous products in the food line. Marula and baobab fruit are not the only Zimbabwean trees that produce fruit that is eaten in the villages, and there are a lot of species that could be sources of sustainable harvests should there be processing, and we now have those two innovative factories already.
We also need to be thinking about the specialist and luxury markets in the developed world, as well as our local markets and continental markets.
First Lady Amai Auxillia Mnangagwa has built up a strong movement using more traditional ingredients and traditional recipes. But not all those ingredients are available in even a Zimbabwean city shopping mall, although a few more may be found on pavement vendor blankets, and there seems to be potential for processing and packing more of the traditional foods.
Again this opens up potential export markets into specialist food shops and delicatessens. It might well require more of the recipes to be published, perhaps in books but definitely on the sort of web sites that now proliferate for those in the global village you want to try something new.
We would agree that the average Zimbabwean cook, especially in the cities, is remarkably unadventurous and should be expanding their diet, but there are also others around the region and the world who are doing this already and just need to find the ingredients.
The great thing about a wider range of foods is that it is not limiting, if the market expands more can be grown or gathered to meet that demand. Once again we need to think about varieties and taste. For example sorghums are indigenous to Africa and there are thousands of potential varieties. The ones coming from seed houses tend to be those chosen for volumes of stockfeeds.
But Delta, for example, is very particular about the varieties for its traditional beer. In fact it was because it was using the right variety that it was able to dominate the market, and take out the old Salisbury Municipal beers, so that the city had to make a deal for the brand that sold. We would think that there could be a lot more interaction between communities, botanists, farmers and packers to find varieties that people prefer to eat.
Another area where some experimentation may well produce a lot of benefit would be in herb flavours, finding out what old ladies might still be gathering and using, and introducing new ranges into specialist shops. Farmers will grow anything that makes them money, but we still have exceptionally limited ranges of potential crops.
One of the ultimate luxury market areas is the creation of flavoured alcoholic liquors. Italians have possibly done the most work in this area in the last century or two, and among the failures and also rans there is now a wide range of new liquors that barkeeps have been using in fancy cocktails. A glance through a cocktail manual will show what we mean.
In some cases the ultimate luxury has been discovered and marketed, one where increasing the price increases sales.
If you want some more mundane examples, the moonshine made in secret from malted barley in Scotland eventually became Scotch whisky, and among the run-of-the-mill brands there are some expensive originals where the precise wood used to burn to dry the malt makes a large difference in final price.
So while the breakthroughs made by our innovative research-orientated graduates are moving in the right direction, and some of the specialist delicatessen products you can find from small producers in Harare’s northern suburbs are another strand, there appear to be a lot of opportunities to connect traditional and new products with new local and global markets.
Bongani Ndlovu