SUVA: Across the atolls of the South Pacific, breadfruit trees are dying in alarming numbers, victims of environmental change and the devastating impact Westernization is having on fragile cultures, scientists say.

A few years ago the breadfruit crash was seen as “serious” by Diana Ragone, director of science at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii.

After a South Pacific Community workshop here last week, she said it had gone past being “serious”.

The single biggest killer is worsening inundations of atolls by sea-water — a symptom of global warming and sea-level rise.

Shallow rooting breadfruit trees are also vulnerable to the increasing storms, Ragone said.

Two cyclones, Val and Ofa, have totally wiped out breadfruit trees in parts in Samoa.

Moreover the popularity of Western processed foods is taking people away from breadfruit and the trees are being neglected.

Genetic diversity is narrowing and in some places many varieties, each of which had local names, have disappeared.

Ragone said there was no prospect of the breadfruit tree becoming extinct, but the diversity was being lost, and so too a remarkable story behind the beautiful tree.

Breadfruit (artocarpus altilis) is a large, attractive and evergreen tree, reaching as high as 20 metres (60 feet) with a smooth, light-coloured bark and thick large leaves.

The fruit is large and starchy, produced, depending on the variety, once or twice a year. Some varieties fruit all year round. It is thought to have originated in the Moluccas, Philippines and New Guinea area with first domestication in the Bismarck Archipelago.

Ragone has documented in a study for the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute the way humans moved out into the Pacific, taking with them breadfruit, both as food and cloning material so that they could plant it in their new homelands.

The greatest diversity of seedless cultivars is in eastern Polynesia while Santa Cruz in the Solomon Islands has the greatest diversity of seeded plants.

Santa Cruz could represent the mother lode of the plant, but Ragone said fear of bio-piracy has led to the community there forbidding the export of plant material at all.

She accepted their concern but said in the wider global interest there needed to be a balance.

When Europeans came into the Pacific, breadfruit was a matter of astonishment, enhancing the notion of “paradise”. Joseph Banks, a botanist with Captain James Cook’s ship Endeavour, noted that to feed a generation and the next, all a man had to do was plant 10 breadfruit trees — and that it would take only half an hour.

His report on the plant promoted the idea of taking breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies where it could be planted to feed the growing number of slaves there.—AFP