Zimbabwe's baobab trees offer lifeline to rural communities devastated by climate change

Since childhood, Loveness Bhitoni has picked baobab fruits from the gigantic trees surrounding her homestead in Zimbabwe to add variety to the family’s staple corn and millet diet.

She never saw the iconic trees as a source of cash, until now.

Climate change-induced droughts have decimated her staple crops. Meanwhile, the world has a growing appetite for baobab as a natural health food.

Bhitoni wakes before dawn to spend her days foraging for baobab fruit, walking barefoot though hot, thorny landscapes, risking wildlife attacks.

She gathers sacks of the hard-shelled fruit from the ancient trees and sells them on the cheap to industrial food processors or their middlemen.

Baobab is no longer a simple spice. It is a means of survival.

“We didn’t harvest any crops this year, we are only able to survive because of the money from baobab fruits. We are only able to buy corn and salt only. Cooking oil is a luxury because the money is simply not enough. Sometimes I spend a month without buying a bar of soap. I can’t even talk of school fees or children’s clothes,” says Bhitoni.

The global market for baobab products has spiked in recent years, turning rural African areas with an abundance of the trees into vital source markets.

The trees need more than 20 years to start producing fruit, which means they are not cultivated but foraged.

Thousands of people like Bhitoni have emerged to feed the need.

"The fruit is in demand but the trees did not produce much this year, so sometimes I return home without filling a up a single sack. The prices are extremely low sometimes buyers offer 50 cents to a dollar for a gallon (5kg bucket). I need five sacks to buy a 10kg packet of cornmeal,” says Bhitoni.

Native to the African continent, the baobab is known as the “tree of life” and is found from South Africa to Kenya to Senegal.

Zimbabwe has about 5 million of the trees, according to Zimtrade, a government export agency.

The United States legalised the import of baobab powder as a food and beverage ingredient in 2009, a year after the European Union. Together with China, they now account for baobab powder's biggest markets. The Dutch government's Centre for the Promotion of Imports says the global market could reach $10 billion by 2027.

Residents like Bhitoni receive little else for their work collecting the baobab fruit. They say they can only dream of affording the commercial products the fruit becomes.

According to Bhitoni, some middlemen prey on residents' drought-induced hunger, offering the cornmeal in exchange for seven 20 litre buckets of cracked fruit.

“When the buyers come to take our product they have their own gazetted prices, but what I think they should do is to meet and consult us as the local leadership and we agree on pricing," says Kingstone Shero, the local councillor.

"People have no choice because they have nothing. The buyers are imposing prices on us and we don’t have the capacity to resist because of hunger.”

The growing industry is on display at a processing plant in Zimbabwe, where baobab pulp is bagged separately from the seeds for various uses.

Outside the factory, the hard shells are turned into biochar, an ash given to farmers for free to make organic compost and improve soil fertility.

Bhitoni says she can spend up to eight hours a day walking long distances through the sun-baked savanna. She has exhausted the trees nearby.

The difficult situation is likely to continue due to lack of negotiating power by fruit pickers, some of them children, according to Prosper Chitambara, a development economist based in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare.

“When you go to most countries they have actually been able to establish a commodity exchange, I think that actually helps in terms of ensuring that there is fair valuation of those commodities and that the ordinary farmer or the women and children who are actually collecting these baobabs don’t get short -changed at the end of the day because currently it’s really the people that are are actually buying who have greater leverage because there is no market to determine issues of pricing of those baobabs,” he says.

Zimtrade, the government export agency, has lamented the low prices paid to baobab pickers and says it is looking at partnering with rural women to set up processing plants.

As Bhitoni walks from one baobab tree to the next, she carefully examines each fruit before leaving the smaller ones for wild animals such as baboons and elephants to eat — continuing an age-old tradition in the fast changing world of the baobab.