Articles
DEVELOPMENT OF TEMPERATE ZONE FRUITS IN HILLY AND MOUNTAINOUS REGIONS OF THE TROPICS: ISSUES AND CONSTRAINTS
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends, it is a great pleasure for me to take the floor on the occasion of this Third International Workshop on Temperate Zone Fruits in the Tropics and Sub-Tropics, and I am especially pleased to have the opportunity to extend the best wishes and greetings of the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, to all participants and organisers of this congress.
I will try to give an outlook, in this paper, on the possibilities of developing temperate zone fruits in mountainous regions of the tropics.
FAO has been actively engaged for a long time in promoting agricultural development in hilly and mountainous regions.
Briefly, we could mention-Nepal (Development Study for The Fruit Industry in Jumla); Ecuador and Peru (formulation of projects for agricultural diversification in Andine Regions); India (Development Study for Fruit Production in the Northern Region); and more recently the People’s Republic of China (formulation and implementation of The Olive Development Project in Hilly Regions in Hubei, Yunnan and Sichuan).
The problems of agriculture in hill and mountain areas are not exclusive to tropical or developing countries; they are causing concern also in some highly industrialized countries – and here I may give the example of Italy, where a congress was organized in Florence in 1982 to address these problems and to study policies and strategies which could help to improve hilly agriculture.
As a general consideration, in temperate industrialized countries, the mountainous areas have been the focus of tourism-based industrial development.
Here, agriculture has been left behind and now tends to be of a touristic rather than a productive character – often heavily subsidized – but still retained for its role in providing local colour.
Unfortunately, as it does not snow enough in the mountainous areas of the tropics to justify the installation of skilifts and funiculars, the primary resource of these areas remains their agriculture.
Also it seems to be common that in precisely those areas where we encounter typical mountain or hill agriculture, we meet with the social structures which are most in need of help to build up and improve their agricultural activities.
If we are trying to think of ways in which we could approach the problem of developing agriculture in hilly and mountainous regions, we may start by observing the types of solutions which farmers have already found by themselves centuries ago, such as the terracing of entire