Hunt for superior galip nut trees in PNG

 By Tio Nevenimo 

To develop an economically viable industry from a wild and unknown crop such as Canarium or galip nut in a short space of time, several critical issues need to be addressed first. 

They include inconsistent supply, poor kernel quality,  uniformity, lack of market, ease of extraction, and shelf-life, on a scale that meet year-round market demand. 

These requirements can be met by the development of elite cultivars selected for kernel size/mass, kernel nut ratio, and number of kernels per nut, taste, nutritional content, oil content, shell thickness and ease of cracking. 

The production cycle of undomesticated trees are irregular between fruiting seasons and years, creating inconsistency in supply, thus additional criteria are seasonality of fruiting, yield, sex ratio, early bearing and ease of propagation.  

The process involved in finding solutions to these issues would take a long time and would be expensive, especially working with galip that comes into bearing at 7-10 years and  has an economic life span of over 30 years.

NARI has used a simple participatory approach in the domestication of galip, building on work successfully implemented in West Africa. 

This method involved researchers and resource owners working together in identifying indigenous tree species with potential. 

The researchers then introduced a simple but effective propagation technique to the farmers, which enabled them to rapidly multiply and plant trees on a large scale.  The fruits were sold to the local markets where a dealer bought them in bulk and processed or sold them to retailers and exporters.

The participatory method hel­ped the researcher build on the knowledge while the farmers selected superior materials and continued to improve and develop new varieties and production technologies to bring the industry to the next level.

Between 2007 and 2010 NARI scientists went to most galip growing provinces of East and West New Britain, New Ireland, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Madang and East Sepik, in search for galip with superior qualities. 

The exploration was made possible under two donor funded projects by the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research and the European Union.   

The projects were designed to respond to the key issue of supply-side problems through an integrated domestication and commercialisation approach by addressing problems of inherent quality and uniformity (domestication) and efficiency of supply (commercialisation). The projects worked within three major research and development areas within the broad themes of domestication and commercialisation. These were genetic resource exploration, cha­racterisation, conservation and development, application of vegetative propagation techniques and market research.

The three areas are complementary, vegetative propagation is the quickest and most effective means of developing superior trees and planting on large scale quickly but can only fulfil its potential  if trees are selected on traits or characteristics that are based on patterns of genetic variation, particularly, at which geographic scale variation is con­centrated and is available. 

Similarly, selection criteria should be based on market demand and supply information. In each province three sites were selected, and at each site 50 trees were selected and detailed tree and nut character data was collected. 

Samples of 100 nuts were collected from each tree and brought to NARI to collect detail nut character data and to establish a germplasm (seed or tissue) collection on station. 

After the tree and nut character were analysed and trees with superior traits selected, the researchers went back to the individual trees and confirmed with locals their findings. The trees were then marked for rapid vegetative multiplication on site.

After detailed studies on over 1200 individual trees and making observations on thousands of other galip trees around PNG, NARI discovered that the small atoll islands of Nissan, Matsugan, Petats and Futzigan in Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Arawe Island and Asepsep, in West New Britain, Koil and Vokeo in East Sepik have the best eating quality galip. 

This has come about due to continuous selection over hundreds of years. Although, there were superior trees noted on the mainland and bigger islands they did not occur in the numbers and concentration as in atoll islands.

NARI has used planting material from some of these locations and established 250,000 trees as the production base for the galip nut industry development in PNG. These trees are mostly planted in ENB, but large numbers of seedlings and seeds have been supplied to New Ireland, West New Britain and Morobe provinces and small quantities to other provinces.

The hunt for superior trees is a process that will have no end so long as that particular species has an end user who is willing to pay. As for galip, the hunt has just started and is limited only by our imagination, skills and resource to produce and the market forces.