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K0TWA, Zimbabwe — Since childhood, Loveness Bhitoni has collected fruits from the giant baobab trees that surround her home. Zimbabwe to add variety to the family’s diet of wheat and millet. Bhitoni, 50, never saw them as a source of money, until now.
Drought induced by climate change they decimated their crops. Meanwhile, the world has a growing appetite for the drought-resistant baobab fruit as a natural health food.
Bhitoni wakes up before dawn to go in search of baobab fruits, sometimes walking barefoot in hot and thorny landscapes with the risk of wildlife attacks. She collects bags of hard fruits from ancient trees and sells them to industrial food processors or individual buyers from the city.
The baobab trade, which took root in his area in 2018, first complemented things like children’s schools and clothes for the locals of the small town of Kotwa in the north-east of Zimbabwe. Now, it’s a matter of survival the last devastating drought in southern Africa, aggravated by the El Niño climate phenomenon.
“We are only able to buy corn and salt,” Bhitoni said after a long day of harvesting. “Cooking oil is a luxury because the money is not enough. Sometimes I spend a month without buying a soap. I can’t even talk about school fees or children’s clothes.”
The global market for baobab products has grown, transforming rural African areas with an abundance of trees into source markets. The trees, known to survive even in severe conditions such as drought or fire, need more than 20 years to start producing fruit and are not cultivated, but foraged.
Tens of thousands of rural people like Bhitoni have emerged to feed the need. The African Baobab Alliance, with members in the continent’s baobab-producing countries, projects that more than 1 million rural African women could benefit economically from the fruit, which remains fresh for long periods due to its thick shell .
Alliance members train locals on food security. They also encourage people to collect the fruit, which can grow to 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide and 21 inches (53 centimeters) long, from the ground instead of the dangerous work of collecting the huge, thick trees. Many, especially men, still have.
Native to the African continent, the baobab is known as the “tree of life” for its resilience and is found from South Africa to Kenya to Sudan and Senegal. Zimbabwe has about 5 million trees, according to Zimtrade, a government export agency.
But the health benefits of the baobab have long gone unnoticed elsewhere.
Industry pioneer Gus Le Breton remembers the early days.
“Baobab did not develop into a marketed and world-known superfood by accident,” said Le Breton, recalling years of regulatory, safety and toxicology tests to convince authorities in the European Union and the United States to to approve
“It was ridiculous because the baobab fruit has been consumed in Africa safely for thousands and thousands of years,” said Le Breton, an ethnobotanist specializing in African plants used for food and medicine.
Studies have shown that the baobab fruit has many health benefits as an antioxidant, and a source of vitamin C and essential minerals such as zinc, potassium and magnesium.
The US legalized the import of baobab powder as a food and drink ingredient in 2009, a year after the EU. But to get the foreign taste to accept the spicy and citrus taste he made repeated trips to Western and Asian countries.
“Nobody had ever heard of it, they didn’t know how to pronounce its name. It took a long time,” Le Breton said. The tree is pronounced BAY-uh-bab.
Along with China, the United States and Europe now account for the largest markets for baobab powder. The Center for the Promotion of Imports of the Dutch government says that the global market could reach $10 billion by 2027. Le Breton says that his association projects a 200% increase in global demand between 2025 and 2030, and is also careful to increase consumption among Africa’s increasingly health- conscious urbanites.
Companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi have opened product lines promoting baobab ingredients. In Europe, the powder is hyped by some as “real star quality” and is used to flavor drinks, cereals, yogurt, snack bars and other items.
A one-kilogram (2.2-pound) packet of baobab powder sells for about 27 euros (about $30) in Germany. In the UK, a 100 milliliter (3.38 ounce) bottle of baobab beauty oil can fetch 25 pounds (about $33).
The growing industry is on display at a processing plant in Zimbabwe, where baobab pulp is bagged separately from the seeds. Each bag has a label that traces it to the harvester who sold it. Outside the factory, the hard shells are turned into biochar, an ash given to farmers for free to make organic compost.
Pickers like Bhitoni say they can only dream of providing the commercial products that the fruit becomes. He earns 17 cents for each kilogram of fruit and can spend up to eight hours a day walking through the sunbaked savannah. She exhausted the nearby trees.
“The fruit is in demand, but the trees have not produced much this year, so sometimes I go back without filling a single bag,” said Bhitoni. “I need five sacks to have enough money to buy a 10 kilo (22-). pound) package of cornmeal.”
Some individual buyers who feed a growing market for dust in Zimbabwe’s urban areas are preying on drought-induced hunger among residents by offering wheat flour in exchange for seven 20-liter (about 4 gallon) buckets of cracked fruit, he said.
“People have no choice because they have nothing,” said Kingstone Shero, the local councillor. “Buyers impose prices on us and we don’t have the ability to resist because of hunger.”
Le Breton sees better prices ahead of the expanding market.
“I think the market has grown significantly, (but) I don’t think it’s grown exponentially. It’s been a pretty steady growth,” he said. “I believe at some point it will also increase in value. And at that point, then I think the harvesters will really start to earn a serious income from the harvest and sale of this truly remarkable fruit.
Zimtrade, the government’s export agency, has lamented the low prices paid to baobab pickers and says it is looking to partner with rural women to set up processing plants.
The difficult situation is likely to continue due to a lack of bargaining power by fruit pickers, some of them children, said Prosper Chitambara, a development economist based in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
One recent day, Bhitoni walked from one baobab tree to another. She carefully examines each fruit before leaving the smaller ones for wild animals like baboons and elephants to eat – an ancient tradition.
“It’s hard work, but buyers don’t even understand that when we ask them to raise prices,” he said.
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